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      April 8, 2021Genes of 500 Million-Year-Old Sea Monsters Live Inside UsSamantha Kolber

      I swim in an ocean where every segmented body
      is another poet, or a writer,
      a floating leaf
      extracted from the paper
      of books never written, or written
      but forgotten or written but not loved,
      which is to say
      never published. And what is publishing
      but someone else’s rubber stamp?
      An outsider’s approval like the mother’s love
      we really crave, or like the mirror, broken
      into shards fallen—no falling, gliding, shimmering,
      shining—at the bottom of the sea. What monsters
      are we to want to pick up the pieces?
      I hear the mother in me say, so no one gets hurt,
      as if cerulean creatures lurking
      down there, in the ocean’s fractured trenches, are children,
      or were children once, and we still lurk
      in those dark places. Or,
      we’ll be barefoot again soon. Spring
      is coming. See?
      See that sunshine? Who’ll be the first
      to walk bare-skinned out over still-frozen
      dirt and stone? Sea monsters. Poets. Who
      will be first to thaw?

      from Poets Respond

      Samantha Kolber

      “I wrote from a prompt from Bianca Stone, who shared this news clip (https://www.livescience.com/ediacarian-creatures-share-genes-with-humans.html) on Instagram and said, ‘Your one task today is to write a poem with this title. And have it be actually about your mom. But not say that directly. And to end with a question.’ So I did.”