Daniel Galef

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The Kiss of Asterion

“As Thurston Lacalli from the University of Victoria in Canada put it […] the sea star is like a ‘disembodied head
walking about the sea floor on its lips.’”
—“How many arms do starfish have? If you said ‘five,’ you’re wrong,” MSN.com

I should have been a pair of luscious lips
sneering forward under salty seas,
osculating through the riptide’s rips
or spitting free, and flapping where they please.

The act of walking then would be a prayer,
a moving murmur, ba-ba-ba-ba; thence
to tell by taste each sailed-through saline layer
and map the seas by this most subtle sense,

tasting every grain of whorl-stirred sand
beneath my face, each mote of ocean matter.
An orphan head, not sliced or severed, and
not kissed by Salome upon a platter,

but whole, in part—such little weight to press
the kiss-soft floor, my furrow like a scar.
The end of evolution: to regress
into a lightless mind, become a star.

Daniel Galef has been in every issue of Light since Summer/Fall 2014. The final print issue in 2012 was his first poetry publication: He was 16 and sent in four limericks, and has not stopped writing comic poetry since. His most recent ink is the poem “Wegener to the World,” published in the November 2024 issue of the magazine Scientific American. The poem is part of a series of Imaginary Sonnets, the first 70 of which were published as Galef’s first book last year: danielgalef.com/book/