As I showed my class this documentary about the dissection of a white shark that suffocated in the safety net around a South African beach, I started to write this little poem:

The stout researcher measures herself against the immense liver.

She holds the grape-like lens of the shark’s dark eye in her palm.

Freeing the grinning triangle head,

her fingers ski down the pale y-shaped brain

hind, mid and forebrain

over the white scent bulbs

“The gills,” she says, “are like the leaves of a book.”

Meat pages, salt pages, a story in which

blood and water rush

endlessly against each other

(to be continued…..)