Mira Rosenthal

ANEMONE

Is it to feel ourselves as translucent
bloom that we come to watch the waving
purple limbs, these “daughters of the wind”
inside the sea, to know the temporary

pools that form—or keep transforming—
as we gaze into the churning body, searching
for outlines, shapes we might describe
as recognizable, a star, a flower, in words utterly

foreign to the way that life grabs on, begins
digesting whatever object happens to land
inside the jaw just now, let’s hope the thing
is something edible. I hate how we can’t help

but poke a finger in to sense the suction, the tug
of reaction, knowing our strength will always win,
if not in body then with tool, contraption, motor
power, plastic bag, plastic noose, plastic

everything disintegrating—or rather no longer
capable of breaking down. And I hate
our oblivious admiration. A back turned on the vast
waters, bare feet that stumble over rocks.

And in the book on tidepools my daughter carries—
since she’s becoming, thank god, a better steward
of facts—we can’t find reference to the shell
that sits perfectly spherical, dotted & dashed,

in her palm, a 3D ball of Morse code we’ve pried
loose from its flooded cubbyhole. “Touch an urchin,”
we read, guessing at what used to inhabit
this bite-size planet, “and its spines will move

toward you, to better defend what lives within.”

MIRA ROSENTHAL is the author of The Local World, which won the Wick Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, Harvard Review, New England Review, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. Her translation of Polish poet Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies won the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her honors include a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, and residencies at Hedgebrook and MacDowell. She teaches creative writing at Cal Poly and lives on the central coast of California.