Sea creatures, refugees fleeing land

Perch and flail, flipper and fin

We are poised.

Water, we are all water, makes us

Whole. It is not our place 

Women walk the earth, yet

This is how we heal, our flowing fortitude. Slick-skinned and moistening, aqueous

Not aquatic, our lips bruise 

Flesh to wine. Will life always be this precarious 

Towered with home and work, child and mind? 

Pedestaled as madonna

Or flagellated as whore, whose wombs are not our own? 

We who birth, reborn as selkies.