Daniella Toosie-Watson
Just when I almost have you
in my mind’s eye, you are a crane in the water
at the park behind my grandmother’s apartment where I was going to tell you,
I love you, in my new blue dress I bought because I thought you’d like it.
Once—that good night—you touched me with your nervous mouth, a fish’s
lips against my skin; my skin is water, and you, at the surface, are at the precipice
of another kind of air-filled life. We are coy, curved into each other like a ballerina’s feet
en pointe. Our fish bodies writhe, cum-slick, each slit of our ribs ripple in the wake
of our rapid breath. My mouth widens like a siren’s wail. My heart of sinew, sinew:
rippling, rippling. You slippery, finned thing: you’re a feathered, fantastic ice-dancer again,
scaling the pond’s surface with your delicate claws. I call on memory.
When the night came to tell you, I love you, in my blue dress: you raped me.
I almost have it. But then the narrative: I didn’t know it was rape, until the nurse told me,
stealthing is rape. And then, I fucked 8 different people in a week. And then, you are a man.
Where did your scales go? Those little sequins that splayed sunbeams like a filet blade?
Look: I tossed them to the pond like pennies. I wished the water red as my polish-slick,
acrylic nail that circled my thin, finned clit, that good night.
The water wears you like a new skin,
or a pretty dress.
Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) has been published in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, VONA, and the InsideOut Detroit Literary Arts Project, Daniella was the profile writer for The Kennedy Center’s Next 50 and is currently a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute. They received their MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where they were awarded a Zell Fellowship and Graduate Hopwood Award. Daniella lives in New York with their pup, Faye.