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  Table of contents Issue Twenty-six MOTES OF SPARKLING GLASS
by HOLLY DAY		 Home  
   
 

You can teach brine shrimp to dance
by shining a flashlight into their tank
and moving it back and forth. They will follow the light
like a scarf of sparkling dust mites
like a swarm of swallows alighting for the night
like a cloud of gnats discovering a piece of rotted fruit
like a pulse of transparent blood vessels traveling along a vein.

What they don’t tell you
in the manual that comes with the tank
that says shining a light into the tank will teach them to dance
is that you’re really just tricking the tiny shrimp into thinking
that their hiding place been suddenly exposed to sunlight
and sometimes it kills them
and sometimes it forces them to change gender
and sometimes it makes them spontaneously reproduce
and sometimes it does nothing at all, because this whole time
the tiny specks of dust you shook into the water of your sea monkey tank

weren’t actually brine shrimp eggs at all
but just bits of sand gathered from the shore of some faraway beach,
some beautiful, warm, tropical place
that you will never get to see for yourself.
   
   

 

endmark



Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in Borderlands, Slant, and The Mom Egg, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published books are "Walking Twin Cities" and "Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch" and her novel, "The Trouble With Clare", is due out from Hydra Publications late 2013.



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