SPORK PRESS
sporklet 16
Sarah Wolfson
Algae Blooms in August
Murky spheres that might
billow or break or

 

transform
you altogether. Again you miss

 

the Persiads, ergo
another bucket list with

 

a hole, dear Liza. Summer
examines its own

 

planet: another place
threatened, another youth taken

 

by a policeman’s bullet. And now
a high jumper rebounds

 

into the shape of a starfish. And now
the season of sinkholes,

 

cicadas, and pride parades
in which the young Prime Minister

 

struts in white slacks. Algae means
several unrelated

 

species; the Japanese
have many words for moss: facts

 

we repeat at parties as evidence of
the sparkle of the world

 

inside the sparkle of
ourselves. A daughter

 

is growing up and away. Of the girls
who went to Syria as

 

fighters’ brides, one has met
the fate waiting

 

for its middle to play out.
The planet of horrible things

 

washes her personal
items onto our dining tables

 

next to half-filled woodland
animal ceramics: epilator, lipstick,

 

underwear. Elsewhere
a loon flies overhead and on hearing it

 

you may say you live on earth.
Quietly next door

 

the neighbors make plans
to adopt their own

 

grandchild. Their daughter
puts on ever larger

 

sweatshirts and smokes
on the stoop with her younger

 

sister, her face placid,
bewildered, and humming

 

to the receding sun:

now this, now this.
A Handful of Crabs

And now the internet has found a hermit crab housed in a blue-eyed doll’s head
separated from whatever other parts

 

had made her vaguely human. Her globed crown now crawls on eight sturdy legs,
a grotesque sideshow set nowhere

 

in particular except in front of us. It’s snow crab season in Quebec, also time
for fiddleheads, asparagus.

 

You know the season. The short one reserved for bright, sweet emerging things.
Click and her head will crawl again

 

on ten articulated legs. You might be tempted to think that’s it
for hermit crabs this week: enough

 

exposure, enough strangeness for one species but over in another corner
of this nowhereness, a wrinkled hand

 

folds and unfolds on loop to show dozens of miniature hermit crabs, a proper handful,
the fingers clenched to bursting

 

as if with bird seed. Each time they open, a swarm of misshapen Easter eggs clambers
over the other small, hard ersatz-bodies,

 

some green, some blue, some the many variegated shades of soil. Most are fast,
but even the apparently dead or dormant

 

eventually move, too—outward and away and off the edge of everything,
climbing over whatever is necessary

 

on tiny twitching feather legs. All at once a wonder and a horror and your average
case of standing by

 

to watch a stranger’s hand let water or other miracles slip through it.

Friendship in Midlife

Surprising and

gelatinous: suddenly seeing

an octopus

 

up close. Arrives

in the middle of things: marriages, diseases.

Hesitates

 

and flourishes in the uncertain pattern

of a dog lost

in the city of its own

 

residence. Traffics

in fractal, tentacle,

constellation, unset

collarbone. Gets

undone. Comes home.

Rebuilds

 

with interesting materials:

lost socks, gills, old news.

Allows moss

 

to cover what it will.

Does not see lichen

as decay but as a sign

 

of good air. Like your

grandmother’s

enormous aloe:

 

is prepared for burns

but also just to grow

in whatever light

is given. Shares

a common grief

for conflicting conditions:

 

here an emptiness, there

an over-brimming. Sees

a common nuthatch

 

out different windows.


Sarah Wolfson is the author of the poetry collection A Common Name for Everything (Green Writers Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Fiddlehead, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, PRISM international, and TriQuarterly. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches writing at McGill University.