Neptune’s Handfasting
Petra Kuppers
Volume One, Issue Three, “Plein Air,” Poetry
Godzilla rubbed his belly and burped.
Purple microbes popped in the hurricane,
loosened themselves in gut loops, kicked
the membranes, flicked across mucus
to the outside. They flew. Pacific rollers
silvered so they could surf, a gaggle of
abandon, too small to drown, fragments
of dinosaurian DNA unspooled in the dawn.
The ship breathed in the mist. The wave
sprinted in from the stern, the invisible
conga line kissed dull red metal, climbed
the hull up to an open porthole, slithered
in a bead of foam, and dripped right in.
Tiny violet streamers tasted and tugged,
hooks searched for nooks in sailor
flesh beneath the fresh howl of air,
the wave’s sinus ebbed away but here
was a home, moist human welcome.
Tissue-deep, the little ones roamed.
Vibrations sang into tangle.
Fangs connected to mitochondria.
A snore escaped, a crewman’s snuffle.
All settled to stew.
All bedded to starless heave of night.
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, a Professor at the University of Michigan and an advisor on Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. She leads The Olimpias, an international disability performance research collective. Her academic books engage disability performance; medicine and contemporary arts; somatics and writing; and community performance. She is also the author of a dark fantasy collection, Ice Bar (2018). Her most recent poetry collection is the ecosomatic Gut Botany (2020). She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space, with her wife and collaborator, Stephanie Heit. Petra is a Black Earth Institute fellow.