'The Sting of the Jellyfish' by Justin Hamm

The Sting of the Jellyfish 

In my daughter’s drawings, we resemble
a trio of jellyfish: our pumpkin-round heads
without torsos, our long inky legs 
squiggling playfully down the page
before culminating in feet like oversized breadloaves. 

If we are indeed jellyfish, then we’re clearly
happy jellyfish, with our upturned mouths,
despite our eyes, which are empty, oblong,
strangely akin in shape to gourds,
potatoes and yellow squash. 

These are the figures that cover
page upon page in my writing notebooks,
that appear like trademarked logos
in the corners of my wife’s grocery lists.
Sometimes they even add a dash
of unintended variety to our comments
on students papers. 

And they are there too, at night,
taped to every surface I pass
as I make my habitual visit to the refrigerator,
a lonely search party of one,
intent upon rescuing the evening’s leftovers
from a long life of isolation and mold. 

Three happy, healthy jellyfish, one of us
a bit wider and rounder, a bit topheavy
(even for a jellyfish), but all of us smiling—
beaming, really, and when I look at them,
I understand this is the way my little daughter
believes it will always go for her family. 

Sometimes that in itself is enough
so that I return the pork chop
to its cold nest of rice, applesauce, and peas,
re-snap the red Rubbermaid lid into place,
and sneak back to  bed with the burn 
deep in my belly. 

But sometimes nothing is enough. 
Not even the memory of walking 
into the kitchen at first light, 
way back when I was seven or eight,
a scrapyard scattering of assorted donuts
surrounding my mother, who lay face down,
asleep again at the table—this a long time
before the heart attacks or the hospital visits. 

I’d whisper her awake, and she’d spring upright, 
embarrassed, cruller crumbs and Krispy Kreme
smeared from her chin to the small space
between her nose and her upper lip.
Ask her what she was doing and she would swear
she didn’t know, and damn if that wasn’t
the truth of it. 

The devil liked to grab hold of that woman. 
Once he turned loose of her, she almost never
remembered anything.