Jess Yuan: AQUACULTURE QUARTET • Cleaver Magazine

Jess Yuan
AQUACULTURE QUARTET

[1]

to explain eyestalk ablation
imagine floating mid face
fallopian tube connecting to the ocular nerve
………….in your shrimp body

………….eroded by
a losing economy
overextending, deteriorating

because blindness makes more babies in her
………….she grows fertile in dim light

is it possible to construct a gentle and fair existence?
my eyeball promises a brighter world

if only she were whole
and the world her oyster

[2]

coral too
when broken
regenerates with desperate flare
so the laboratory can celebrate their accidents
incorporate their expertise and destruction

like starfish
……………..pull your fingers apart to become five people

……………..do the work of five women to save the world

[3]

frog fish squid and oyster
all these friends ejaculating millions into
this disastrous bisque
this delirious broth
……………..frothing foam of each bubble a being

……………..how could this not be enough
when everyone is not only pulling their weight
but producing a thousandfold?

bountiful harvest, fishes and loaves
bruises healing under the fabric
water shining mirrors over
the multiplying bloom

[4]

how much more can we be forced into?

……………..scorpio and cancer besties
water signs with exoskeletal grief
with a favored claw for scraping bottom
scooting sideways or forging ahead
together in algal murk

……………..plated together
……………..in Jumbo Seafood Dinner
……………..crab and lobster resting on lettuce

Look at us

I just want to hold your claw
in mine

Jess Yuan is a poet, educator, and architect. She is the author of a poetry collection, Slow Render (Airlie 2024), and chapbook, Threshold Amnesia (Yemassee 2020). She has received support from Kundiman and Miami Writers Institute, and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Johns Hopkins. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, jubilat, and elsewhere.