Lucille Lang Day's poetry collections are God of the Jellyfish (Cervena Barva, 2007), The Book of Answers (Finishing Line, 2006), Infinities (Cedar Hill Publications, 2002), Greatest Hits, 1975-2000 (Pudding House Publications, 2001), Wild One (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2000), Fire in the Garden (Mother's Hen, 1997) and Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope (Berkeley Poets' Workshop and Press, 1982), which was selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and Michael Rubin for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature.

GOD OF THE JELLYFISH 
 
The god of the jellyfish 
must be a luminous, translucent bowl 
the size of a big top, 
drifting upside down 
in an unbounded sea. 
 
Surely, this god, hung 
with streamers and oral arms, 
ruffled and lacy 
as thousands of wedding gowns 
and Victorian bodices, 
created all the jellyfish of Earth. 
 
Male and female, god created them 
in god’s own image: 
the cross jellies and the crystal jellies, 
the sea nettle and the golden lion’s mane, 
the sea wasp and the Portuguese man-of-war-- 
 
and gave them nerve nets instead of brains 
to ensure their humility, 
put statoliths like tiny pearls 
in their sensory pits 
to give them balance, 
and placed spines on their nematocysts 
so they could capture food 
and would sting and burn any 
living thing 
that would harm them.

And the god of the jellyfish 
gave them ocelli 
that shine like the eyes on a butterfly wing 
when they turn toward the light, 
and now their god watches over them 
with god’s own great ocellus 
as they swirl and dive 
in glistening cathedrals, and does not 
expect worship or even praise: 
the iridescence 
of their umbrellas will suffice. 

 
PLAYING "ST. LOUIS BLUES"
AT AUSCHWITZ 
 
Consider all possible universes: 
the ones that quickly collapse 
into black holes, the ones filled 
with double-crested cormorants, 
Queen Anne's lace and quasars, 
the ones that glow with blue 
and yellow stars that last forever, 
the ones with only planets wrapped 
in poison atmospheres and deserts. 
 
Picture the planet Earth in one 
possible universe, where at first 
only a faint sound comes out 
of the trumpet at Louis Bannet's 
frozen lips, then a few sputtered notes 
as the guards walk toward him. 
Frostbitten from head to toe, he lifts 
the trumpet, tries again, and the guards 
stop when "St. Louis Blues" begins. 
 
They change like water going 
from ice to liquid, like the universe 
blooming from nothing at the Big Bang. 
He plays as people go off to work. 
He plays as the trains come in, 
"Between the Devil & the Deep Blue Sea," 
in one possible universe, where moments 
are stacked liked cards, the past with no 
existence, except in the present. 
 
Moments are shuffled and reshuffled 
to give the illusion of time and history. 
Everything happens at once and forever. 
Somewhere, Bannet is still playing 
"Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Tiger Rag" 
at a party for Dr. Mengele, hidden 
from the guests behind some plants, 
and in all universes where trumpets blast, 
as long as he plays, he lives, they dance. 
 

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