“When It Happens” and “Matriculating”

By Trapper Markelz

 

 

When It Happens

I watch for sharks,
but it’s the swimming that could take them

out beyond a double dare
where feet touch sand in flinching spray.

I pray they will swim there forever,
furiously count the water slashes

as seagulls hover like rescue helicopters.
Who will be the first to break?

Which of us will strip off our shirt
and put in a swim to beat back chance?

Instead, I watch them, mouth open,
tread parallel to the beach—to a safe place

where everyone is frantically screaming
and pointing, like some far-off balcony

before a shooter suddenly relents,
lowers his rifle, and calmly ejects the shell.

 

 

 

Matriculating

I am making payments out of my 529 account–
wondering about the gender of my filet of Costco salmon.

Is it a masculine O sound or a feminine Ah sound
at the end of the noun? Both are sounds I make

during morning sex, sounds I make when someone tells me
something I should have known all along.

My street is gentrifying, my cis daughter with breasts is gender-fying,
and the bra shop has cut the heads off the models in a defiant act

of de-objectifying. How does one become worthy of all this flesh?
Grocery store grown. A gift of marriage. Reverse magic

at my waist and ankles. I am surrounded
by free-multiplying embryonic gastrulating differentiated flesh

for which I’d give every dollar of my name to see survive and evolve
into children of Astraeus–father of the wind

                                                                   –and I gave birth to a constellation of stars.