Hammerhead

The first time I used you, / I was no older than twelve. / Standing small in the shower, / I plucked up the plastic / handle, slid my vision over your blades. / A strange sizzle erupted when / I raked them over my shin. Never again / would my leg hair glint so softly, so blonde. / I was only doing what was expected / of me—or so I thought—so I taught / myself, through snags and bumps, / how to pick a body clean. I wanted / sheen, the gloss of magazines. / Every feather plucked was an opportunity / to fly lighter. To ritualize your use / was to grow dependent. A decade later / I still scour drugstores for sets / of razor heads. When claimed at last / by rust or blunting, you come to face / your fate: clanging the inner ribs / of a trash bin. Again and again / I send you to your hell, a black bag / dripping with mold and toenail clippings—life / diminished to its ugliest bits. / A rip in the sack’s skin / sends you sprawling / off a truck, into the road. / You follow rainwater / into drains, drains into rivers, / rivers into ocean where you toss / and turn in the current: abandoned baby / hammerhead, limp and stinking / of unnatural pink. Without agency / to flap or paddle, you fall / toward the sea floor, helicopter / toward thousands of years of restless sleep. / Beautifying is a type of mining. Wrecking / a blade through layers of skin, / we invite scars to persist. / When Earth turns over an era, / everything is repressed. History’s dead / skin is mashed down, churned / into subdermis. Who will find you, / little shark? Not even your bite can break / the surf, the strength / of gravity’s shackles. The mantle of / our planet will tell the story of waste / worship. Before the sun falls / into fever and sets the ocean / to boil, will anyone be around / to sift hands through wet sand, / to unmuck our fossils, / to make sense of this wreckage?

Caroline Hockenbury is a poet and nonfiction writer from Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Tinderbox and on Virginia Quarterly Review (Online) and is forthcoming in The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II. She won the Myra Sklarew Award for remarkable originality in an MFA poetry thesis at American University. If she’s not drafting copy or web editing, she’s probably taking a picture of a toad in portrait mode to text to you. Find her online at carolinehockenbury.com.

Published July 15 2024