the cuttlefish
for Georgina
their green-blue blood pumped by three
separate hearts: two branchial hearts to
pump blood to its pair of gills, one heart
for each gill, and the third to pump
blood around the rest of the body.
i try to draw a comparison, some analogy
between the three-hearted cuttlefish and our
own mode of being and conclude:
a heart for the egyptian gill
a heart for the american gill
and a heart to reconcile,
simply put.
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Teisai Hokuba. Dried Cuttle-fish and Plum Blossoms, early 19th century. Polychrome woodblock print. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Maryan Nagy Captan is an experimental writer, educator, and performance poet based in Austin, Texas. She is a Poetry Fellow at The Michener Center for Writers and serves as the Marketing Director for Bat City Review. Maryan is the author of copy/body (Empty Set Press, 2017) and an alumna of the Disquiet International Literary Program. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Egyptian Writers Folio (Anomaly Press), AJAR, Apiary Magazine, Mantra Review, Boneless/Skinless, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere.