By Alex Carrigan
There is a type of immortal jellyfish, capable of cheating death indefinitely. I wonder how much knowledge they’ve accrued over the years. But they don’t have brains to hold that knowledge, do they? So all they absorb is where the current takes them, how warm and cold the water is, and whether or not they’ve brushed against something. They’ve lived this cycle an infinite number of times, so maybe the brain they once had wasted away eons ago. Maybe they realized they didn’t need to perceive or react, so they let those go too. They must have decided it would be better to float and not think than to only think about floating. Maybe then it would handle the fact that it would remain in the ocean until it dried up, and then it would bake under the sun until the sun went supernova, and then it would burn and cook until nothing left of it remained but a lingering desire to float once again.
Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in The Broadkill Review, Sage Cigarettes, Barrelhouse, Fifth Wheel Press, Cutbow Quarterly, and more. Visit carriganak.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @carriganak for more info.
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