The Velella

2 Minutes Read Time

A grainy photo of a velella on the ocean floor. It resembles a circular sheet of plastic, ribbed with rings. It has a flap on the top of it pointed upward, and a faint blue color. — Photo by Dawn Casey on Unsplash

“Velella: a genus of floating oceanic siphonophores widely distributed in warm seas . . . having an oblique crest which acts as a sail and often causes the animal to be drifted to coasts remote from its native habitat.”

—Merriam-Webster Dictionary

“It’s a very curious animal. It’s considered a colony . . .” [Professor of Biology Kevin] Raskoff said. “If you were to remove one, it wouldn’t survive. It really kind of twists the mind around what is the individual exactly, as opposed to what is a member of a colony.”

—“Blue Jellyfish Washing Up on Beaches by the Billions,” Southern California Public Radio, August 20, 2014


Summer leaks lazy
rainbows in pools on the sand. 
We follow the trail of velella 
beached by deviant
deep-ocean winds,

blue-tinged tentacled 
orifices suckered on surf’s
edge; their inch-high ridged fins 
salute day’s capitulation.
The Ferris wheel’s

purple swirl lures us
to the pier’s weird carnival; tarred 
boards stilted over grumbling creaturely 
waves. The joyless crowd is a rough 
surf, shattered colony of humans

left high and dry
by some primeval surge,
wheeling from bumper cars to ring toss 
below the styrofoam stares
of phalanxed hot-pink

bears. I buy you
suckers big as your faces,
mesmeric candy wheels, magic mirrors 
whose swirls you peruse
with blue tongues.

You are running
on the boardwalk after sunset.
Streetlights and foot traffic fall away, the sea 
travailing somewhere in the dark,
wetting the wee jellies,

sweeping them under again?
Glowing out there, pure and flame-blue? 
Ahead the lights of a rescue vehicle, the tang 
of some trash-can conflagration.
To you all is still joy, you

jump from curb
to curb, lit by night and beach
and sucker. The little sails of my prayers 
catch the wind. Overleaping
a gap, you

are suddenly beached, 
skidding on grit, knees torn,
sucker shattered. I am fin-thin, ridged, 
translucent, saluting this tragedy, 
straining to detect

those that might
come, those that are coming, the earth blown 
off course and swept clean, creatures 
stranded on the banks
of far stars.

We gather what we can,
carry the pieces home. I thumb
their roughed surfaces under tap’s gush. They drool pools 
of color, pining to heal, to swim on the deep
alongside their million star-blue siblings.

Sharon Kunde

has published work with Twentieth-Century Literature, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and other publications. Her chapbook, Year of the Sasquatch, is forthcoming with Dancing Girl Press. A postdoctoral fellow at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute, she lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Return to top of page

Search