Crustacean
Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Running your hand through a stream, a little crustacean attaches itself
to your fingertip.

It punctures you where perception stops and doesn't hurt. No yell, just
little trove of delight to feel this lifeform clinging to you.

Sometimes grief — many-petaled, in the reproductive season, hot —
cowers, removes its shell, briefly, and you see it, too, is simply a case of
misplaced vulnerability.

In its vibration, we, ourselves, are seen. To love what you cannot see or
to see what you cannot love? Which is your problem?

What is at the precipice of naming has overstayed inside you,
somersaulting in the late hours, the infinite skeletal choreography of the
repressed. Its implosion, its tape.

Every face hides inside it the decision to live. At a hilltop, you knot your
hands behind your back, not with a string, but with a mind.

The grass pelts your face as you roll down the hillside, the velocity of
recklessness. The beautiful daises trampled, being pushed down deeper,
deeper on the pyramid of unfair composition.
from the journal POETRY LONDON 
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I am continually mystified by the possibility of the sentence. "Crustacean" must have come when that mystery came to a fever point. I see some of my favourite sentence-makers (Roland Barthes, Mei Mei Berssenbrugge) in this piece, and yet there's philosophical speculation that voices itself here. I have the bandwidth for such rumination, though this poem always feels strange, in a pleasant way, to reread––I'm not entirely sure which self of mine wrote it. 
 
Carl Rollyson on "How a Young Sylvia Plath Found Her Literary Voice Through Diary Keeping"

"Her desire to assemble a salon, a group of likeminded souls, is reminiscent of her days at camp when she celebrated in letters and diaries the new friends that formed a circle around her. She began diary entries 'Dear Diary,' as if addressing an alter ego and putting her life in order. 'Dear Diary—you’re one of the ‘musts’ for peace of mind,' she wrote on October 11, 1945."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Mary-Alice Daniel on Object Lessons

"Science is one language articulating the esoteric fabric of spacetime. Verse is another valence. Astrophysics and poetry pair prettily. Both concern themselves with the behavior and spectacle of celestial bodies; with the margins of massive matters alongside the infinitesimal; the inconceivable infinite. Dreamers in the two disciplines speculate alternate & extra dimensions. We enlist anomaly. We trouble in stasis. We peer into—across—the reality tunnel: the entangled expanse between what you see and I perceive."
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