For my dear friend, Jeppe*
When the tiger shark is pregnant,
Falck told us, the embryos eat each other
until only two remain. The remaining ones wear gold.
The departed potential sharks paint the facades
of their former houses yellow. And inside the sand-dusted mansions,
an entire medical museum stretches full of the instruments
the whole mess of medical professionals had used,
such as scalpels and orbitoclasts
in pale yellow lace pockets.
Teratology is the study of congenital abnormalities,
said the doctor shark, with his hind teeth floating in formalin.
Don’t worry, most people are afraid of the children,
he assured the visitors. Now tell me, what are your favorite
antique medical devices? A scarificator
for ritual bloodletting, a plastic bag, a rusted fleam?
And what is a cargo bike anyway?
Narrative poems are too overworked
to work properly by day. How many houses
could your brain’s butterflies even need?
And beyond such a translucent yellow exterior,
where would all the blood go?
In the interrogation room, we know
most people sweat, fidget, ask for water, try to buy time,
do something to reveal themselves,
but this suspect was stingy with his bodily motions.
The kids called him dinner daddy—in caps.
When playing hide and seek, where would one even hide
a skeleton in a closet? we ask among ourselves.
It would have to be a rich person’s closet, a walk-in at least.
Confusion in his water tree grey eyes,
confusion in his ventricular tachycardia—
either that or dementia.
In any case, he moved as if in slow motion,
or at least underwater.
We know panic
burrows deep,

sits still and heavy in the body until death.
What was your humoral pathology again?
Was it too much blood, phlegm, black bile,
or was it the color yellow,
same as the first peaceful homes
of the embryo sharks?

*From Katrine Engberg