Two Poems by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and Sarah Blake
The Sea Witch Tackles The Zombie Problem
Suppose that you’re a scientist studying octopuses. How would you know whether an octopus is conscious?¹
sun in the tank the escape instinct
the problem of containment the common bucket
the meeting point between epistemology
and ontology has no spine has a beak
has both ink and a body like ink the pouring
of the self into the flexible bag of the self
she considers how the humans interact with her
how they cry express their selfsame reasons
for crying inarticulately as fish
it doesn’t help she’s seen the souls of fish
every culture has a version
of the myth in which a man pays
a great price to put a question to an oracle
and every time he asks the wrong question
every time he despairs at both the answer
and at his lack of cleverness which is to say
a man cannot overcome his predictability
is he conscious? is he…
the problem of fixing the problem
qua chair you really mean bat under a bridge
you really mean batness
she reminds herself time makes it meaningless
walk over a glacier and lo it comes to pass
that the humans discover that the sea itself
can look upon them with her eye
it’s conscious they say we did not know
Wherein The Sea Witch Finds Out About The Practice Of Bleeding Horseshoe Crabs
Climbing naked onto her bone-roof is,
she knows,
an overreaction to the pictures in an article
in a recent Popular Mechanics²—
but the more she stares
at the rows and rows of crabs
held to metal trestles by black rubber straps,
bottles below them filling with thin, cerulean blood,
the horseshoe crab is a minor god, perfect and ancient—
sparkling needles inserted into the exposed flesh
at the bent hinge—the more she’s convinced
bind and unbind the oxygen atom from its copper core—
all human paeans to nonviolence are born out of fear
of being found out.
Her errable form. The wind and its buckling.
the air is a desert of unbreathing—
She steadies herself and counts the houses
she could curse, could burst,
as the air
around her begins to turn to water.
the horseshoe crab waves her book gills—
I am coming for you,
she says into the water-air,
I will stanch your bleeding with human clots.
¹ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul
² http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a26038/the-blood-of-the-crab/
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is the author of BETWEEN (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press), winner of the 2017 New Women’s Voices Series prize. Recent work appears in venues ranging from The Recluse to the Los Angeles Review of Books. She lives in Maryland and teaches at Washington College.
Sarah Blake is the author of Let’s Not Live on Earth and Mr. West, both from Wesleyan University Press. In 2013, she was awarded a literature fellowship from the NEA. Her debut novel, Naamah, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. She lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and son.
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