BROOKE LARSON

EYE SEES YES

Yet why something here.

What a question, kid.

Nearby in time a bog drags

its spitwad-aeons to a human animal

it wishes to kiss into soft leather.

To wrinkle like a watercourse

over algae-fanged rocks.

Man-fingers crabbed like mangrove roots.

Planets are islands where life

forgets how to swim back.

Everywhere huge and wet.

Micro sea-skeletons chalk up storms

astronauts observe.  Unlikely 

cataracts over Earth’s blinding thereness.

The eye adheres to dead stars.

Between mopping up the light and

wringing out a sharp

image of here,

it quick allows itself

an old blur:

the eye’s own star-lashed

first blink of 

unresolvable dazzle. 

Of course the plankton see you there!

When the same sea and sun branched

the eye in your socket.

Just because.

Earth’s big bluesy iris

is self-curious.

Blinks us into being

that through us it might

look back from the moon, the micro-

scope, and see, at last, itself:

waving.

Brooke Larson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and is currently a PhD student in Poetry at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her poems and essays have recently appeared The Offbeat, Gravel, The Swamp, and Dialogue Journal, and she was the 2017 runner-up for the Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize. Often, Brooke runs away to teach primitive survival skills as a wilderness guide in Arizona's Sonoran Desert.