Anyone might look down and in a Rorschach
moment see birthmarks or bruises.
Anyone might
see budding periwinkle or a mother’s face
jutting from beneath the sofa’s edge. Or salty
sea water—anemone blinking there.
What it really is
is 5 x 8, blue and tan, same burlap you’ll find
at the bottom of any living room rug worn bare
from vacuuming.
So many trampled blues
they insist you call them something else—tattoo,
eye shadow, ripped jeans.
Who made this rug?
Who filled the vats and soaked the thread, who
started the big loom in motion? It’s not exactly
the work of frenzy—
blue is cool.
It’s more like the slow blur where manatees
circle beneath the algae.
When I close my eyes,
if I force them closed, press my fingers until
it’s bright inside, then pop them open—
it’s hard to tell
what’s bottom and what’s top. What’s gravity,
what’s float. Someone must have waded in
and dropped a stone straight down to make
this cockeyed bullseye-halo.
The blue,
the brain, the eye—every story is part light,
part shadow. Like looking down into the sea,
all that motion made by moon, until
we cup our hands and bring it to the surface.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 4.
Luci Huhn is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, whose poems have appeared in Ploughshares, West Branch, SWWIM, Leon Literary Review, Rattle, and South Florida Poetry Review, among others. Her chapbook, The Years That Come After, was published by Breakwater Press. She lives and writes in Southwest Michigan
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