A poem from last year

Ink, Water, Metal, Hamlet

Stephanie Upton

You Ophelia

My Ophelia

You weren't meant to be so pretty

Standing there walking into a madness

Into a madness like bleeding ink

Into a lake which has spread out before you

Pulled from murky plastic tubes

I let the black ripples move

I let them seep through the shoreline where you walk

You walk like a stalk of papyrus

My Ophelia thin as a reed

Madness warms you

Madness heats you through the gray fiber of a thin slip

A thin gray slip that could be the underwear under a nuns habit

A small strip of lace on your tense leg is all that shows your heat

You're thin as a cat tail Ophelia

And the cat tails beside you are ragged strokes of rust

The same burnt umber forms the swarm of gnats

That fell from a broken pen

To circle your mad head

You're face is six lines set at angles

The madness you clutch in both fists is toxic lilies

And the lily venom looks out from your angled eyes

Through your dark hair

Toward the surface of a lake murky with rust.

Jellies

Jellyfish are horrid.

Perfectly horrid.

They're balls of mindless hunger, shooting little harpoons into tasty guppies, inedible kelp and the bare knees of children too slow or ignorant to avoid the little mermaid manes of these scarlet scourges. So watching a horde of them die, glowing their last in a phosphorescent low tide was satisfying.

Or at least it was until my girlfriend waded into the receding ocean, scooped the harmless blue jellies up in her soft white hands and deposited them one quivering mass at a time into deeper brine.

Reeking algea stuck to her shapely, fresh shaved legs and rough particles of sand clung to her dainty toes.

I touched one of the jellies with the very edge of a cautious fingernail. The creature acknowledged me with the weak light of primitive nerves. Squeamish, I left him to fate and the pull of a careless moon.