You Are A Jellyfish, Ghost
by Robert Krut

  1. The bridge, like an unhinged elbow,
  2. spreads across the river.
  1. Each car flees the city, and the paint on homes
  2. appears to attempt escape, as well,
  3. instead looking like loose fingernails
  4. held on by paper thin cuticle.
  1. It is quaint to picture ghosts here,
  2. shackled and robed, figures of a Delta Dickens,
  3. or as some skeleton with threaded muscle
  4. in a dusty suit singing standards in reverse.
  1. But go out tonight—
  2. the fog spreads the light farther,
  3. but thinner, and you see it—
  4. a jellyfish, bioluminescent,
  1. floating at your eye line,
  2. its bulb the size of a skull,
  3. a human heart inside its cup,
  4. a lock of hair trailing beneath.
Packingtown Review – Vol.7, Winter 2015/2016

Robert Krut is the author of This is the Ocean, Bona Fide Books, 2013, which received the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Award, as well as The Spider Sermons, BlazeVox, 2009. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lives in Los Angeles.

  1. Robert Krut
    Gargoylepoetry