in jest, I might have been struck. 
Down by Oakbank Pond

and goose-poop 
green on the walkway washed away, 

leaves lashed down and plastered to our chests. 
“Run for it,” you hollered at me, 

into the force of the storm—the kind that—
when the lightning strikes—

smells eggy.    
Home and soaked to our pubic bones,

we shed our shoes, our soggy socks, 
and peeled the cottons off. 

God could have chosen to make us other than flesh. 

“Don’t look at me,” I chafed, “my mole is showing.” 
Seriously, the body-fraught, resistant, 

pertinacious. Some of the old stuff sticks, 
despite …

I’m thinking of chalazae—
the stringy twists of tissue that join the egg 

yolk to the shell. In Home Ec., seventh grade, 
Miss Dinn, taught us how to remove them 

with our thumbs and index fingers. 
“You don’t want stringy white things in your cakes, 

girls, or your cookies.” She never called them 
“chicken spit” or the start of a baby chick, 

but we gave each other the knowing look 
and giggled. Some of the old stuff sticks—

I still remove the chalazae from every egg. 
We saw a fox on the opposite sidewalk, 
jogging along in the squall, gripping a big 
bright egg in his jaws. 

“By the size of it, that’s a goose egg,” 
you yelled out to me in the din. 

“Yes,” I bellowed back, “so those chalazae 
would be gross.”
                        

Wading in and eager to lower 
our bodies into the sea, 
we swam every day 

till they came. 
The water almost 
hid their flimsy tissues, 

their jelly heads. 
The lifeguard saw them 
quiv’ring in the ripples

and blew his whistle. 
They’d gathered in the thousands 
at the beach. Attracted, 

we were told, to our human smell.
(If one can be attracted 
without a brain.) 

“Concentrate,   
and scramble 
the algorithms,” 

Sandra says,  
“Take your dreams
and wishes into sleep.” 

Lacewing green—the lot of them—
this uncanny, subtle colour.
I thrilled to the thought of being 

touched and stung, the supra-
natural beauty of translucence, and the wonder: 
every hurt reversed.