A Flock of Scallops by Zebulon Huset

Poetry reader Frankie Spring on today’s poem: The wheel spider lives in the desert. It is named for its ability to use its legs like spokes and roll as fast as 44 turns per second down sand-dune hills. Watch a wheel spin, ignore the context, and you might think it’s just repetition, rotation round a fixed point in empty space. Wheeling helps the desert spider outrun its main predator, a wasp looking to lay eggs inside its body. Something is happening. We’re getting somewhere. Far from the desert, to the sea. A scallop opens its hard shell, reveals a meaty wheel.

A flock of scallops

A submarine field
of algae-cloaked
castanets clack 
soaked flamencos
for drowned ghosts.
One must cease
counting specters
once the depths
are teeming with
once-brained-souls—
even ignoring those
with blowholes or
gills. Will we really
be ball-and-chained to
but one shoulder-borne
boulder for eternity?
In an endless ocean
of space and rocks
and potential?
What a waste.

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Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He is an avid advocate of writing prompts and exercises as a way of strength conditioning your creativity, frequently posting writing prompts at his blog Notebooking Daily and editing the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine.