Touchy Feely

At the KOA, my dad showed me how to gut a fish
like one day, it’ll really come in handy, and it might.

The earth is always too wet and too dry and on fire,
and I don’t really know what counts as a marketable skill.

What I remember from the day is how the inside
of a fish is nothing like the outside. One side glimmers

like a creamsicle sweating off its stick. The other side
has no glimmer, just blood and like a lot of it. Enough

to keep a body alive. A fish can fray at its edges into wisps
of flesh, all while the scales sparkle in the light. Imagine

evolution pushing gills into or out of an embryo.
The summer I worked in a tuna lab, the scientist sliced

the head off of an injured yellowfin to show us how
their blood circulates past the heart in the opposite

direction as ours. Its heart fell with a soft bounce
onto the concrete floor while she took my two fingers

and pressed them into the hole where it was and said
Feel that. It's warm. And it was. Like satin you’ve rubbed

between your fingers in some sort of pretend quality test.
She didn’t let go until I met her eyes and said Yes. I feel it.