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.