The aquarium charges twelve dollars
to watch the jellyfish drift
in their blue cylinders, lit
from below, the way a glass
of milk looks holy on a dark counter—
and I pay it, my broad thumb
smudging the receipt, already
thinking of the gift shop’s
plush translucent things
I’ll buy for no one.
My niece once said beautiful
about a bruise on her shin, the purple
spreading like a continent
nobody named yet,
and I thought: yes, that’s it,
that’s the whole problem,
how we were taught to call
damage gorgeous when it holds
still long enough.
The docent explains
Chrysaora fuscescens has no brain,
no heart, is mostly water
and the urge to drift—
colonially simple, she says,
meaning no central self,
meaning every tendril
acts alone and together
and the sting is just
a body doing what it knows.
My niece is eleven now.
She has learned, already,
that certain rooms
will scan her at the door
before the art does.
Someone has mounted the largest specimen
behind glass the size of a church window,
its bell pale as the inside of a wrist,
and the tourists press toward it,
phones out, mouths open,
we are all so hungry
to be near something
that does not need us,
that opens and closes
by water alone,
that can fill a space
completely
without asking
whose space it was.
