Julia Rose Lewis

SHALL WE SHELLFISH

foolish mytilus
blue widely distributed
mussel trossulus
secretes the thread to bed down
hard substrates tonight
the gland is good night sleep tight

here fertilizer
pollution levels pounds on
pounds of nitrogen
bring on the zooplankton
the blue-green blooming
confusion of phosphorous

the northwestern sound
sends us to deception pass
to swinomish pass
through the main basin drain the
body of water
we will follow the treatment

{sea} (too sinister)
{leveling up pollution}
-two-amino-three-
[four-[bis(two-chloroethyl)
amino] phenyl]
propanoic acid {fin}

contaminated
with chemical therapy
we were meant to treat
multiple myeloma
repeat it repeat
multiple myeloma

signal word danger
{a mean salt remembering
yellow blisters two
colors} two-chloro-N-(two-
chloroethyl)-N-
{name}methylethanamine

mare and foliage
suffer the butterfly white
to cream horseradish
palomino pale oil
one-chloro-two-(two-
chloroethylsulfanyl)
ethane propane bute-
to tame misty and stormy

terminal moraine
is sills as the marking point
deposit sings heaps
creating the drumlin field
hills by the hundreds
finding the half buried egg

nitrogen singing
cytoxan and melphalan
must from mustard gas
pass from humans through mussels
what we eat we are
what we excrete into sound

free of grit they fought
for their negligible beards
while shallots lick leeks
and garlic and shallots and
dijon and grain seeds
dissolve into sauvignon
blank the cantaloupe
as flesh so fishes its wish

Julia Rose Lewis is the author of Phenomenology of the Feral (KFS, 2017) and co-author of Strays (HVTN Press, 2017), as well as multiple pamphlets the latest of which is Miscellaneous (Sampson Low, 2019).