Cat Batsios | Jellyfish Lesson | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Cat Batsios is from Flint, MI, and currently lives in Detroit where she is a teaching artist with Inside Out Literary Arts. You can find her work online or in print, she writes about Flint and Detroit mostly, and a great deal of her poetics come from thinking of her city as Atlantis. Her marketable skills include teaching poetry to minors, deconstruction, and talking shit.

Afua Ansong's Website.

Also by Cat Batsios: Chinese Lantern from my Greek Father Re: Daedalus, a poem in five parts

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Her

August 2018

Cat Batsios

Jellyfish Lesson

Think of Turritopsis dohrnii which starts its life cycle over when mortally threatened Translucent like the water in which you were born, & not until its body, the shape of tide/ mimic of the space around you — feel it when it comes close to ask why you didn’t know she had bruises under her raglan cotton sleeves — how you couldn’t tell she was washed in three years of silence, how were you so into yourself that you didn’t feel her arm tense when you took it — genial until membrane sting, that jellyfish question. At first, when it comes close you don’t even think there is a question billowing groestque in safe waters & you remember the jellyfish found off the coast in the Mediterranean, how when it dies cells escape its body, & it’s young again not unlike your mothers being hunted & trapped under dressers as children, or other stories of cooking grease, teeth, tufts of hair missing in pigtails, a legacy of hiding in the yard while a woman was at the jellyfish end of a sawed-off shotgun. It crept inside when you were a girl and you answered with nights slept in cars or diners, or waiting, answered with smoke, your own ugly body that hasn’t deserved one good thing ever. But just now it comes close, & you feel something leave your bodies as you share a doughnut & she washes three years of silence down with milk.

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