A chandelier molting  
into dishwater.

A spoon carrying
a drowned moon.

Light thickens
into verdigris—

between illness
and ornament.

A glass bowl nursing
what remains
of the afternoon.

Not the shark's hard doctrine.
Nor its cathedral of teeth.

Give me the bloom
beneath the visible world.

An oracle surfacing
without vertebrae.

Roseglass
widening
into parison.

Violet—
outgrowing
its voltage.

Molten blue
refusing
its vessel.

The problem
with translucence:

people look through you.

The water holding
the form open
for as long as it can.

The shimmer first.
Then the collapse.

The mouth
changing shape
around every name
it survives—

and still
calling itself—

I.

—Cara Waterfall

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