Melissa Buckheit
CATALOGUE: UNUSUAL SYMMETRY
Show yourself
spiny, globular animal
who inhabits all zones
intertidal to 5,000 metres deep
round and spiny across
crawling with your tube feet--
you eat slow moving animals
avoid sea otters, wolf eels, and triggerfish
as urchin is an old word,
sea hedgehog,
archaically
*
echinoderm
fivefold with bilateral symmetry in youth
larvae holding a mirror
phyla of chordates, arthopods, annelids and molluscs
destined to inertia across the oceans
tropic to polar
what is first marine, 450 million years ago--
cousin to the sea cucumber,
the sea star, brittle star and crinoid
*
faithful pentarmerism
and transparent feet by the hundred,
(to see such blue through
whether regular urchin or irregular dollar,)
transport and carry
such model organisms
of developmental biology
over the sand deposits of time
shouldn’t we be so too
Show yourself
spiny, globular animal
who inhabits all zones
intertidal to 5,000 metres deep
round and spiny across
crawling with your tube feet--
you eat slow moving animals
avoid sea otters, wolf eels, and triggerfish
as urchin is an old word,
sea hedgehog,
archaically
*
echinoderm
fivefold with bilateral symmetry in youth
larvae holding a mirror
phyla of chordates, arthopods, annelids and molluscs
destined to inertia across the oceans
tropic to polar
what is first marine, 450 million years ago--
cousin to the sea cucumber,
the sea star, brittle star and crinoid
*
faithful pentarmerism
and transparent feet by the hundred,
(to see such blue through
whether regular urchin or irregular dollar,)
transport and carry
such model organisms
of developmental biology
over the sand deposits of time
shouldn’t we be so too
Copyright © Melissa Buckheit 2019
Melissa Buckheit is a queer poet, activist, dancer/choreographer, photographer, lecturer in English, translator of modern Greek, and professional bodywork therapist. She is the author of Noctilucent (Shearsman Books 2012), and two chapbooks: Dulcet You (dancing girl press 2016), and Arc (The Drunken Boat 2007). Her work has previously appeared in Molly Bloom 17.
