Size / / /

But there are jellyfish twenty miles wide
in the atmosphere of Saturn. Languid,
hazy monsters, they school together
like manta rays. Their tentacles
measure hundreds of miles. Fleshy
flora, frilled drapery, they sweep
into each other, taking what they
need.  Purest thermodynamics,
they fall when cold, rise when warm,
buoyant as algae. They are
stones that found function with each other,
beaks of birds that never survived,
the sound of marching in snow.
When one dies,
its body, sheer and tremendous,
closes the lid on another section
of the aging planet. The plexiglass
heads stack up like inverted lenses,
incomprehensibly deep,
huge eyes to be dug into by
archeologists on quests to find life
on Saturn. The jellyfish are subtle.
When they flock, they move as
sepia disks, glacial birds, vertebrae
from the largest animal
in a dream too big
to believe.




Ting Gou's poems have appeared in Ghost Ocean Magazine, plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing, and the Nassau Literary Review, among others. She has a BA in molecular biology from Princeton, where she also completed a creative writing thesis. She is currently a medical student.
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25 Mar 2024

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