After the bright jellyfish, snow crabs,
seadragons unlovably leafy,
the great Pacific octopus unfurls
her many-pearled arms.
My fingers tighten in the jacket pocket
where we secretly hold hands,
the toothless stuff of romance
a week old.
Toothless and boneless,
the placard says,
she can escape a boat
through a quarter-sized hole.
I imagine the black-eyed kraken
slipping a net
as the fishermen pull up the knotted mesh, empty –
and with one long, amorphous arm,
she takes a man with her.
A single tentacle brushes his hair
and grips his waist
with those lip-like o’s,
leaving something like kiss marks.
He arches in the air
(my fingers tighten)
and fights the whole way down.
Regan Green is a poet and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and the assistant editor of the “Birmingham Poetry Review”
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
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