aquilolamna

when i think of Romeo and Juliet, arguably the most famous love story ever told though it makes me cringe, i know that they won’t last as long as the fossil of a Cretaceous period shark that lived between 66 and 93 million years ago

yes, this is a love-poem for a fossil of a shark or perhaps just for its achievement of immortality

when i see god, i see him in the little things the flawless design of limestone— a rock made out of bones, monuments like Stonehenge, and the pyramids, the most immense funeral lie ever told

the perfect conditions must exist in order to preserve cartilage in limestone the coincidence must be immense that one specific aquilolamna milarcae sank to the bottom beneath silt, hidden from scavengers until eons had passed and someone discovered it

when i think of these coincidences, i know that it was no accident we slept under the same sky for two decades that it was no simple twist of fate that brought you to me— i know that red hair and blue-gray eyes are a rare genomic incidence so you are an anomaly in more ways than one

after we break, i run into the waves at high tide cursing your name with the conviction of stone, waiting for a lone shark fossil out beyond the surf to hear me it doesn’t matter that it is tattooed on my body in not so many words

the sentiment remains: the immortality of our love could not outlast the massive continuity of sharks