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.