Joanna Ingham

Advanced sharks have only a single ovary

From now on I will be a shark
slipping through my months with sinuous shoulders.
Advanced, of course: requiem or smoothhound.
I will begin to sense electrical currents,
the slightest change in pressure,
and two thirds of the total weight of my brain
will be dedicated to smell.
I will be able to detect a teaspoon of blood
in an average sized swimming pool.
My eyes will glow green in the dark.
I will be particularly attracted to
sounds made by wounded prey and I’ll use my teeth
to learn more about an object.
A test bite may be fatal but I won’t mean it.
With my ampullae of Lorenzini
I will sense each time you contract a muscle,
learn to navigate by geomagnetics.
If you touch me, you’ll find my skin has grown
a million tiny teeth. On my back,
I’ll enter tonic immobility. My cloacal opening
will be tight and white between pelvic fins
and my scars will be mating related.
I will keep my single ovary tucked up close to my liver
inside my elongated fusiform body. To breathe,
I will remain in constant forward motion.
I will be boneless and lighter than before.

Joanna Ingham is a writer from Suffolk. Her first pamphlet, Naming Bones, was published by ignitionpress in 2019 and her second will be published by The Emma Press in 2022. Her poetry has appeared widely in magazines and journals including Ambit, Butcher's Dog, The Interpreter's House, Magma, The North, Poetry Birmingham, Poetry Wales, Under the Radar and BBC Wildlife. It has also featured in The Sunday Times and the anthologies The Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt) and Places of Poetry: Mapping the Nation in Verse (Oneworld). In 2020 she won the Paper Swans Press Single Poem Competition and was commended in the Café Writers Open Poetry Competition.