KAI PRETTO

Electrogenic

I had been told
to drown as fish is to be full-up
with oxygen, to become
buoyant with oxygen, to bloat
and expand like overstretched balloon,
like blobfish
so unjustly named.

But I know
that there is oxygen in the ocean
and it is not toomuch
but not.enough
that dries out their skin
and leaves them

breathless.

So to desire
land and dirt and stone,
perplexing inversion
of sea—of wave and moon-tug

and silt—is to be un-fish
say the others who will shrivel
in the scathing sun.

But truth
is a motley thing that wears
many faces.

I did not know
I was electric eel, obligate air-breather:
Hundreds of volts
swirling in a self-protective storm.

I cannot breathe through my gills
no matter how often I am told to,
how often I have tried. Yet I can survive
where gill-breathers cannot.
And I can survive, too, underwater
long enough to masquerade
as fish.

But when I race
to the surface—gulp
mouthfuls hungrily
into bloody mouth—I expand,
not overfull but satiated, and bask
in the sun

that the other fish
cannot understand,
will never see.

Kai Pretto is a genderqueer & neurodivergent emerging poet whose poetry vacillates between the deeply surreal and the uncomfortably grounded. They currently reside in Western Massachusetts and value a quirky sense of humor, thunderstorms, and good boots. They have published in The Shore and have poetry forthcoming in Fauxmoir.