Second Skin - Cagibi

What second skin? I text my daughter. 
Did you grow a pelt?
Selkies come and go from the sea. 
They slip off sleek furs and emerge bare-
skinned, hands and feet a-gangle, 
bracing against land that holds still.
 
I yearn to be a midlife selkie. 
Might help with the hot flashes
to zip in and out of an outer layer,
to be one thing and also, a stranger one underneath. 
I could offer my second skin to my daughter
to shelter her from a professor’s firing
 
and all the president’s lies.
My mother-warmth can transmute 
straight meanness into queer 
prisms of light that cannot harm her. 
I don’t want my daughter to know what 
Republicans think of her brain. 
 
Most of all, I want to slip Sunday’s dead body 
off her shoulders, relieve her 
of the white-sheeted shape on the hood 
of a car that sailed through an intersection 
minutes before she got there. I saw his foot, 
Mom, I saw his white sock. 
 
I surprise her with my tattoo anger
the same day as the professor’s firing
over Charlie Kirk, and the dead body, 
and those terrible mothers who take Tylenol.
My baby arrived silent after two days of labor, 
blue and weary from the sea. 
 
How could she want to scar her body
after I lifted her above the waves?
If I could slip out of my graying seal pelt, 
and use it to pat her dry, I would wipe away 
that tattoo-convention ink, clean 
her skin back to unscarred, brand new. 
                                                         
Isn’t the softness the myth, though? 
It can’t last if a thigh gets a dock splinter,
if a knife slices a finger instead of an onion.
My daughter has figured out where 
in the dorm to dump her garbage
instead of bringing it home to me. 
 
So far in college, she has survived
a C on a rewrite, greasy cafeteria fries, 
making her own eye-doctor appointment. 
Now a bobble-eyed dragonfly marks her
forearm, an hour’s drive away
from the sea of my body.