When Light Asks One Side

The skeleton is gel, stick-of-gum long, half a millimetre. Two fins. On each, one layer of muscle thinner than hair.

They flash the left: it pulls. They flash the right: the dish turns.

No deep thought in it. Only cells that still shorten when the light finds them, and water that has to make room.

Four body-lengths in a minute— slow as a cow shark that never heard of a maze.

What stays is the thin living sheet doing the old work of a twitch because one side was named.