A mistake,
I swim her ocean,
carve out my place
in a salt bed
of placenta. Merchild 
tethered with a cord 
within my mother’s sea. 
Her voice could
wreck me. She
calls me pirate but,
I am her sliver,
a splinter of her
coral bone,
a delicate pulsing
that grows against
her will. One day
she will cast me
away, her imprint
a foreign script
written in my fibula. 
My soft skull will 
harden, my tongue 
conform to consonants, 
but in my seashell ears 
always the sound.