I want to put something inside me. 

No, entirely inside, and seal it 

shut. Leave it there to fester 

or to petrify.  

A pearl isn’t made 

from some proverbial 

grain of sand, it begins 

when a body dies 

inside a mollusk’s shell. 

I want to stitch

myself closed

like thread

through stones and wait

for my memories of you to die. 

There is a measure 

for the luster 

of a pearl, a chart 

to grade a person’s pain. 

How much does it hurt?

It hurts. It hurts

an oyster shell 

in my belly, it hurts

so much I’ve begun to shine. 

Da Vinci once thought 

to paint a pearl onto glass— 

a lacquer mixed with fish scales 

to produce the sheen.  

Little did he know 

how we’d surpass his means:  

the oysters hang in rows 

across the bay, cleaned 

by crews so the wombs 

of the planted pearls won’t be 

smothered by ocean weeds.  

Doesn’t everyone dream

that they’re drowning?



Under the right set 

of circumstances

almost any shelled mollusk 

can produce some kind of pearl. 

I watch a woman use a rusted blade 

to pry open an oyster, flesh studded 

with pearls packed tight

against each other like 

pomegranate seeds. 

The artificial impregnation 

of a mollusk takes only seconds

and a skilled practitioner 

may manage five hundred 

repetitions in a day.  

In my dream, gloved women 

are spreading my labia 

with cold metal clamps. 

They make neat, nearly painless incisions 

and use tweezers to deposit 

small shards of your death inside.  

This grief is biological. I tend it

and it grows. Let me make

something beautiful 

from my pain. 

Legend has it that Cleopatra 

once dropped a pearl into wine  

and drank it whole.