Marine Snow Poem by Miriam Gamble

The memory of sun, it is what they subsist upon
down where the jaws snap blindly
at whatever passes, where drifter is a meaningless term

and to hunt is to proffer teeth and tongue
and ghost-lit lantern
into a sea like liquid wind,
without prior compass
of the way the wind is blowing.

Should they be gifted with a corpse
whose half-spoilt flesh holds distillate
eternal summers
spent glittering in the euphotic zone,
they will give gross thanks and, in their way, be holy.

In the cartography of sea,
they are kin not to dragons nor the Stella Maris
but to your own bright band —

yes, you there, eating your sunlight secondhand
from a long-gone grocery display,
drinking it from the guts of lazy lemons.