Beautiful Red Creatures
Water mites ride a mosquito
like clusters of hot cherries
the color of Mars or Arcturus,
Earthworms, foxes, male cardinals
plumed with flame, tomato frogs
oozing poisonous glue,
scarlet ibises and their bills’ sickles,
red pandas, red squirrels, lobsters,
vermilion flycatchers with wings
as small as rose petals, red-on-yellow
to kill a fellow–coral snakes,
summer tanagers molting the blaze
of their feathers, ladybugs,
humboldt squid, firetail damselflies,
Spanish dancer sea slugs, my ex,
her hair the hue of raspberries
blushing our pillows, the tint
of blood or communism
in our deep red state, our town
with long red stoplights and rednecks,
her lips crimson when she sang
grunge lyrics Baptists didn’t know
before I knew she couldn’t
make me in her own image,
before I called off our engagement,
packing books in my red Nissan
and she texted me, writing
that she was not in love with me
as I drove west through the ruby sunset
hoping to find some impossible
shade of crab or Malbec
and discover fire a second time.
Octopi Have a Brain in Each Tentacle
where all eight ganglia thrum consciousness,
one central brain circling a gullet, oysters
siphoned through the mind-ring towards a stomach
bagged inside that billowing head balloon.
From Cartesian reason to IQs, people
deem thinking linear as vertebrate bodies.
Skull-shelled hubs of neural hierarchy command
teeth to chew, hands to hoe the unsown sod.
Cephalopods span from half-inch pygmy squid
to seven meters whisking under icebergs.
In coral nooks the octopus dreams of shrimp,
opening pongball eyes, her waking thoughts
familiar to human animality
as breathing, hunger, maternal care for eggs
like jars of incubating ballerinas
hatching to glissade through the fathomless blue.
Eric Fisher Stone is a poet, composition instructor, and PhD student at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. His poetry publications include three full length collections: The Providence of Grass, by Chatter House Press, Animal Joy, from WordTech Editions, and Bear Lexicon, from Clare Songbirds Publishing House.
January House Literary Journal 
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