Kenton K. Yee
We jurors had to wait outside twice a day.
Each time, we gathered at the poster
depicting an octopus’s beak,
like a lobster claw, protruding from
the white shirtsleeve lip of its mouth.
And each time, one of us pointed out
its metaphor to the long tentacles
and hard claw of the legal system
and its legions of mouthy bureaucrats
in white shirts.
I once asked my dog’s vet
how to locate an octopus’s three hearts,
its orchestra, keeper
of its rhythm and jazz, blues
not ours to hear. And once I saw
a trevally rise out of waves
to swallow a seagull and its beak full
of fish in midflight, leaving
only feathers bobbing on the foam
to warn of what lies below.
And maybe the poster’s saying
that justice lurks out of reach,
waiting in the watery depths
with the shirt-sleeved beaks
and leaping trevallies.
About the Author
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Plume Poetry, Threepenny, TAB, Constellations, I-70, Hawaii Pacific, Indianapolis, Terrain.org, Grain Magazine, OxMag, McNeese Review, Lunch Ticket, The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II, and Rattle, among others. Kenton writes from Northern California.