ON "FLICKERING" BY YOSHIO OKADA

by Jenna Le

“Flickering” Box with Sprinkled Design of Jellyfish, 2020, by Yoshio Okada

Wood box decorated with

gold and silver lacquer

on a polished black lacquer ground

with shell inlays and shell overlays

depicting the coin and ribboned-hat shapes

of jellyfish, 

those invertebrates prophesied

to engulf the ocean entire

if climate change continues unchecked: 

if this is how we must die,

well, Yoshio,

this wood box of yours

would at least make a beautiful coffin

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011); A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), a Second Place winner in the Elgin Awards; and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming from Acre Books, October 2022). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch. 

RED JELLYFISH

by Orel Protopopescu

Credit: necn

Let the jellyfish come,
bloated, like warming seas,
tying their tentacles
around the rudders of ships,
until even the willfully blind
will see smoke rising
from the scorched lungs
of the Earth.

Let the jellyfish come,
waving thin, pale arms,
peeling off the blinders
of indifference and despair,
awakening hosts of children,
stirring the birds
we shed like old moons
as we burn away skies.

Let the jellyfish come
with a sting for every sin,  
marking crime scenes
with their toxic,
bloody flowers,
flashing red alarms
through the acid oceans
we set on simmer.

   

Orel Protopopescu won the Oberon poetry prize in 2010 and a commendation in the Second Light Live competition, 2016. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Light Poetry Magazine, Lighten Up Online, and paper-based reviews and anthologies. Her book of translations (with Siyu Liu), A Thousand Peaks, Poems from China, was honored by the NYPL. Other publications: a book for teachers of poetry, prize-winning picture books, a bilingual poetry app for children and a chapbook, What Remains. She is currently completing work on a biography of the legendary ballerina, Tanaquil Le Clercq.