Excerpts from Love Amongst the Fishes

Link to Purchase Poetry Love Amongst the Fishes is a passionate and explicit poem in 66 parts that explores Katie's profound experience of falling in love. The poem explores all the joys, longings, complications, desires, disappointments, and the raw sense of exposure that comes with fully encountering another human being. Taking more than a year to complete, Love Amongst the Fishes marks Katie's most intimate and longest work to date.

I

I am behind—trailing.
I miss my time, every time.
Late. A delayed life.
A wrong turn, a distorted instinct,
a carved out, empty shell
of someone who was supposed to be
nevering in a life of substance.
I under those with firmer selves;
a gum sticking to their shoes.
They define...shape me,
reminding of my neverwas place below.
Beneath, behind, forgotten, and long-since gone.
I travel a nevering space of a too long-lived life—
from below, behind.
But in this never I met you:
A shadow memory returned from
a nevermore place of possible hope.
There you stood: changed, damaged,
but an evermore to me—
if I can peel myself from
the bottom of this shoe,
stepping out from under to you.
Out from the wrong turn, wrong path,
the place of nevermore, neverwas—

III

It is a risk
to speak; to open wide.
I craft a speech of fairytale courage. But—
you hear the Grimm hum of that other speech,
the unsanitized fearful macabre
unfolding behind the wide smile.
You, the dark forest woodsman,
stealthily move forward with a soft voice,
and I am caught, enfolded—
your arms, an unexpected contact.
I break open, birthing Red Ridinghood out
into your warmth.

We part. I smile.
I tuck myself inside my storybook.
Yet I have been read in the duration of your hug.

VIII

I have always been wanted,
taken, touched, grabbed,
loved, left, in ecstasy or pain.
They reach for me, I follow and submit.
I close my eyes, they disappear,
each and every one fading away—
never remaining at the rise of my day.

But you…
I dream of your kiss, your touch
at the breaking of each and every day,
you remain though you have not been.
And I want.
It is a potent fire snaking through me,
kundalini rising, burning my skin.
I fidget with my hands so as not to touch
you, beautiful you, whose smile ruptures me.
I am heated by thoughts of your lips
on my breast, blazing down.
I melt at thoughts of you within me,
where I want you to become.
You remain with me
at the rising of the day where all
others drift and fade. You have stayed.

And I want, but feel such a despairing ache.
I cannot reach out; I cannot touch
you, beautiful you, I simply do not know how.
I am everything to everyone, but no one to me.
And you stand there gazing, a sun warming,
and I want to stretch across this divide
of years of my pain, isolation and otherness,
to touch your face, your lips, to meet your eyes.
I would hold you until there was nothing left,
not even time, beyond the rise of each and every day.

I plead with myself each night. I will take just one step,
towards you before it is too late—it is always too late.
I will take some step, reaching out across this divide.
But I am terrified of my voice, my touch,
of rejection or acceptance. You terrify me.
Because you remain, when all others
have drifted away, you have remained,
sticking to the surface of my heart
at the breaking of each and every day.

XX

It is a dark room, back lit with blue. The sound of primal water rushes through; glimpses of the primordial ocean that birth us all streak through contained spaces. It is humid, sweat forms on the small of my back, just as my heart races and my skin tingles. It is in this enclosed space, you move toward me, languid—an animal self that sleeps through a haggard life—you stand too close. Your skin speckled from sunlight, an echo of a once-lived life outside this darkness, a past unknown. Your warmth pervades my cold, reptilian self, slipping through me and filling me. Your smell surrounds me with echoes of Neptune’s once powerful reign, diminished and tucked away in southern storage. You smile down at me, your brown hair streaked with flecks of early gray, is it possible I flow through you like a river rushing into your sea? Is it possible for love amongst the fishes?

XXVII

I am caught at the end of a line:
lured by the liquid movement of your body;
the reflected brilliance of your smile;
the smell of you saturating the water.
I want nothing more than to be pulled up—
undulating—but I cannot breathe.

XXXIX

You are Dylan Eli Don**,
shed of his humanish life,
escaping into the sea.
You are my reticent selkie,
always returning to the deep.
It is below, in the dark waters,
you reside for the world is better there.
And I at the edge of the pebbled beach,
search the still pool for some sign of you.
For you are my Fishboy,
my beloved creature born of sand and sea.

**Dylan Eli Don is the son of Arianrhod in Welsh Mythology; he escapes the anticipated harshness of his human life to become a creature of the sea.

XLIV

My fairy hands uncurl around my finding
from the mythic depths of the sea.
And your fairytale smile surfaces;
I am enthralled, my held heartbeat skids.
Your voice murmurs a story near my cheek
…goose bumps, I shudder in my fascination.
I swaddle my passion in a Mermaid’s Purse.

XLV

You still me, holding me in your eyes.
When you stand close,
your warmth blends into my skin.
I dream of you above me, paused in passion—
and you enter me in an infinite, repeating tide.
I inhale and awake from my captivation,
the space between us has narrowed.
We stand together, side by side.
I look up;
and you down.
Anticipation and possibility heat this space.

LIII

I wish to strip myself bare before you—
to be raw skin and bones;
to be a coherent, complete self.

I wish to strip myself bare before you—
to be shed of clothes like others;
to come to you as me and no other.

I wish to strip myself bare before you—
to feel your breath on my skin;
to feel the roughness of your bare hands,
a hint of who you are that is no other.

LVII

Sharpness beneath the calm quiet,
a body bound up, anticipating the wrecking;
You lash and recede;
the salty ocean spills from me.
It is not possible that you go.

LX

My intuited you loves me
in a phosphorescent landscape.
I drift in this underwater realm
held in an ever-present warmth.
But we have surfaced into
a desiccated reality, hauled up,
suffocating on air. You sink back.
I am beached.

Final Poem

You are gone. But I am never without.
You are mapped in my memory,
having sailed you countless times.
You are my ocean whom I have longed for,
whom I have loved from youth.
If there is ever fair weather on your seas,
I would return to you and there remain
for all the days of my life.

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KatieBatten

Spunky seahorse living in the deep blue sea...