Two Poems

Julie Strand

Commensalism

 
 

Remora          (Distance has a shape when we place our bodies apart, stand)          Shark
 
Pilot Fish     (on the beach almost with a toe in the water. Water to sand to)      Sea Turtle
 
Monarch Butterfly      (boot to inseam to boot to sand to water. We draw)      Milkweed
 
Orchid       (the hole in our mind, in the shape of us. Up against a body)        Tree
 
Egret            (our skin has different potential: small is small, red is red.)                 Cattle
 
Burdock         (When we step back, no wider than our wingspan,)         Fur
 
Barnacle       (distance becomes, our bodies the frame. We hang this space.)          Whale
 
 
 
 
Epilimnion: Routes Around
 
                       The lakes and green trump any other ghosts we carry around
 
Lake: a considerable inland body of standing water
 
                       any other bodies we used to live in, or bodies we used to live among.
 
Lake: a purplish red pigment prepared from lac or cochineal
 
                       You are here, frozen and sweating, mosquito-bit and blue-toed,
 
Lake: to cause (blood) to undergo a physiological change in which the hemoglobin becomes dissolved in the plasma
 
                       layered and bared. We are here drawing our routes around.
 
 
 
 

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Julie Strand is a poet, teaching writer, and arts administrator living and working in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. She received her MFA in creative writing (poetry) from Boise State University. Her chapbook The Mae West Defense was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Weave Magazine, JUPITER 88, The Boisean, and others.