How to Not Drown / Sea Sponge is Feeling Stuck

Two poems by Genevieve Carver

How to Not Drown

the trick is to stay calm ~ let the plankton oxygenate your blood ~ your breath become dry ice ~ use the plastic gyre as a raft ~ nappies as armbands ~ bag-for-life-jacket ~ beware black swallower ~ goblin shark ~ munitions one stray bubble could detonate ~ talk to yourself as if you were a friend ~ but would you chose you for a friend ~ or would you slink off with the gangs of dolphins ~ licking pufferfish to get high on toxins ~ would you bite off more than you can bow-ride ~ as you relax into the cyclone ~ the whales will put on soothing playlists ~ humans yelling to each other over city bypasses ~ ignore the titters of the pretty cockles ~ today you are blobfish ~ paranoid anchovy ~ rusting wreck ~ but even bleached and brittle skeletons of coral ~ have been known to regrow afresh ~ after a nuclear blast ~ waving their ardent arms ~ like born-again believers

Sea Sponge is Feeling Stuck

having no muscles to move with

no limbs or wings or fins

life just drifting by like plankton

same damn routine every day

tide-sweep one way. . .

. . . and back the other

I feel like I’m just existing, you know?

says sea sponge to coral

but coral knows the danger of flux

my flagella are withering

says sea sponge to limpet

limpet sends a YouTube video

about radical acceptance

before snailing away

you taste like death and diesel !

sea sponge screams at ocean

ocean says nothing

enraging sea sponge so much

that the cells inside begin

to quiver . . . rupture . . .

break free from the body

and one by one

lay down a new skeleton

chasm of a microbe’s width away