The Birth of Venus

For the tides, barnacles open their throats to drink

or close the door to brood in their own wetness.

Barnacles ruin hydrodynamics; they are

expensive & insist on slowness. Venus

is a mythology of vegetation, fertility. That we

come to shore ripe. Beneath Botticelli’s

scallop shell (compact mirror, teenage girl

hand imitating the chatter of some boyfriend,

a fist opening & closing me like a door),

a sleeve of barnacles. Imagine an underbelly

of hungry, one-eyed zooplankton, tempera-

paint crustacea gazing malocchio out onto

Botticelli’s wrists, their own Mediterraneans

pulsing & what aphrodisia brewed there

unrealized, Emily S in magic marker on a

bathroom stall writing [my name then] is a

lesbian before I knew the nature of my desire,

or why I was dressing up, my costume jewelry

shimmering like calves of docks & even

now in cosmic tubs, my ghost mouths open