Blue blooded monarch, triple hearted, fluidly unspoolsherself to wind then unwind
her reach stretching across the sea with the throbs of time.
Liquid sac of sentience, her mind feels through the dark deep.
The sea, with its perpetual twilight indigoed
from eons of volcanic floods and the endless silt of nameless rivers.
She is a rainbow of tactility with genes so wise she regenerates
herself at will, wearing the sea’s dreams
like a shy queen, changeling with her endless handkerchief drops.
Now, she glides through vast colonnades of graying membraned coral,
emptied and eerie with silence, seeking a darkened nest,
some sheltered crag to brood and birth her private treasure of tear dropped eggs.
Each tentacle as mindful as the next, she tastes the ocean’s burgeoning brine
and feels an odd prickle of silvery pressure
inescapable now for she is carried only so far by the currents.
Clinging to the rock face, she curtains her eggs in long, opalescent strings,
refreshing each globe with air,
before covering her clutch of eggs under her mantle.
She braids each glossy drop within the blanching bracelet of her arms
until she whitens into trembling tatters
that lace the drift and flow and settle upon the ocean bed’s remains.
Since she cannot, perhaps each lucent head, all innocent ebony eyes it seems, will rim
the waves and member and remember to entwine its genes
and find that sovereign, solitary gesture to save itself and so survive this age.

 

M.L. Lyons received her MFA from the University of Washington. She has also co-edited “Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workplace.” Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart and most recently she received a Vortext scholarship from Hedgebrook writers’ residency.