and not only because I find
their tentacles, even the look of them,
hard to swallow. No, the miracle
of their daily existence astounds
any rational mind, the lives they live
above and below sea level with equal ease,
their complicated breathing, not to mention
their intelligence, like the one
that escaped its comfortable tank to return
not to the ocean but to its handler’s desk
where the handler sat, stunned, to see it fling a shrimp
gone bad from its dinner, back like a fish too small
to bother with. Or the other who realized
an artist was sketching it and posed motionless,
tentacles curled to show off its flexibility.
Speaking of—look how the octopus fits inside
the tightest of spaces, like water, like air!
Happy Houdinis, watch them in one quick
slither and squeeze become conch or clam,
mug or Mason jar. Each one in the ocean now,
I have no doubt, would beat me at chess,
which makes me wonder why they
with their otherworldly auras, their inky squirts
and stratagems, have not arrived at the top
of the food chain, stewards of this wild world
we humans have made a mess of. Or perhaps they have.
Perhaps, as we kill ourselves slowly, numbers dwindling
too subtly for us to notice, they count us, not
from a height, but from the depths, because they alone
know there is power in malleability, know
there are rich flavors reserved for those lying low.
—
Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in over 100 journals and anthologies including The Hollins Critic, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and Delta Poetry Review. She is the author of A Dangerous Heaven (2023), Play (2016), and Bitten (forthcoming 2025). She lives in Florence, SC, where she serves as the first poet laureate of the Pee Dee Region.
