Skip to main content

Euphausia superba

Three of my poems were published in Otoliths journal, on 1 August 2022. Otoliths is an Australian online journal created by Queensland-based poet Mark Young.
One thing that drew me to this journal was its name. Otoliths are small round bones in the ears of vertebrate animals (including humans). They sense gravity and movement, which is crucial for balance. As an undergraduate zoology student, I spent hours volunteering on a research project that involved removing the otoliths from small fish. The otoliths absorbed minerals from the water that the fish were drinking and living in, so by matching the mineral composition with the concentrations from different creeks and rivers, it was possible to see where the fish had migrated from.
I don't think I ever found out what the research findings were, but I do remember that yanking out bits of bone from behind hundreds of fish-brains was horrifying and satisfying in equal parts. When it came time to choose my own research project for my Honours year, I intentionally chose a project that involved working with live animals that stayed alive while I was working with them. No more digging into brains with tiny tweezers!
Of the three poems published in Otoliths, the first is Euphausia superba. Before you put that into Google, I can tell you that it's the Latin name for Antarctic krill.
This poem was inspired by an article I read a couple of years ago, Oceans of Krill, by marine biologist Stephen Nichol, from the University of Tasmania. It was published in the anthology Best of Australian Science Writing 2019. What stuck with me was Nichol's commitment to krill. He was so committed that he even had krill tattooed onto his arm.
I enjoyed how in the article, Nichol wrote about krill with such rapture. One of the descriptions I loved was the "shower of pink raindrops", which I used (with credit) as the first line of this poem. It's sort-of a concrete poem, with the lines roughly suggesting (a very small part of) a swarm of krill.
It's also intentionally silly in its comparisons, but hopefully zoologically accurate. Euphausia superba can be read here: https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2022/07/steph-amir.html or an image is included below. 

x


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cash, Handshakes and Crowded Trains

I live in Melbourne, which claimed to be "the world's most liveable city", until COVID hit us harder than anywhere else in the country. For me, 2020 was a bit of a weird time for my city and the world to be turned upside-down by a pandemic.  The reason was, I'd spent the last two years fighting hard against obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which hit me hard in 2018 following hospitalisation with a life-threatening illness and ongoing physical disability.  My OCD manifested in a few ways, but the main one was around the avoidance of germs.  So, it was somewhat surreal to suddenly have everyone else fretting along beside me, but with a slightly different emphasis. While the reality of OCD was very clear to me, it was often spoken about it a way that I found profoundly irritating.  The preoccupations and self-protection mechanisms of OCD suffers were described as being completely ridiculous, when in fact many (though not all) are grounded in truth, albeit taken to u...
Post a Comment
Read more

Light and Colour I

Anyone who has met me knows that I don't really have a haiku vibe.  I'm neither minimalist not serene, but in the interest of exploring different poetic forms, I wrote a few haiku for the 'Light and colour' issue of  Echidna Tracks journal last year, and had two published.   This is the first one.  The editors removed the word "where" , but I prefer the symmetry of the 5-7-5 format. When I read this now, over a year later, the word 'mourn' jumps out, but at the time, it was written with the intent of capturing a particular time and place.   Just over a decade ago, I was heartbroken after being dumped by someone who I'd been crazy about.  I was living with a friend in Brunswick, in Melbourne's inner-north.  The front of the house faced west, and in typical sharehouse style, we had an old couch on the verandah.  I loved that I could have the comfort of the couch combined with the warmth of the afternoon sun.   The relationship h...
Post a Comment
Read more