by KAI COGGIN
(for Hyla chrysoscelis)
My wife made a siphon with a long black tube
and through some slow water sorcery sort of vacuumed up
the hundred or so wriggling tadpoles that were clinging
to the side walls of our small plastic pool,
not to be sucked out into oblivion mind you, but moved swiftly,
as if worm-holed, into their own private pond we made out of the blue
tupperware bin that used to hold our Christmas decorations,
now a makeshift manger for a hundred or so baby froglets
almosting into their other selves.
And you should have seen their little black bodies
shooting out of that tube all slow motion,
like the softest bullets moving peace,
wiggling into this smaller ocean
one after another until every tadpole
was safely transported into this new den
of development, and normally we would just walk
the big blue container over to the koi pond
and dump them in there to live out their metamorphosis
but the koi fish have been insatiably hungry lately
and that just seemed like a raw deal—
they wouldn’t have stood a chance, you know?
So here we are, in the peak of summer,
midwifing tadpoles in the anthropocene,
the epoch of humans changing the climate,
and us in our forest home doubling as wildlife sanctuary
creating a safe little stillness for these hundred or so babies to grow.
What’s a few days? we say to ourselves,
then we find out a few days is actually 12-14 weeks
for these squiggly adorable things to become frogs
who can actually fend for themselves and survive.
Maybe mama tree-frog singing her nighttime trills
from the gardenia out our kitchen window
knew the koi pond was a no-go,
and desperate times called for desperate measures,
so she released her jelly clutches of eggs
into our human hands,
and yes, these are desperate times everywhere,
and it’s about time humans did something for
a species other than our own.
So here we are—
delivering tenderness to tadpoles
for an anonymous amphibian mom.
Is there ever a threshold of tenderness?
I never want to cross it.
Sometimes I go out and sit by the baby blue
transformation station, watch them all wiggle,
give them silly names like Jane and Barnaby,
even brought a couple of floating lily pads
from the koi pond and plopped them in,
tilted a nice stone to the wall, moss,
really spruced up the place,
and they seem to like it,
so here we are—
change protectors,
doulas of evolution,
midwives of metamorphosis,
helping a fellow mother of the world,
who sings her trills of thanks out our kitchen window
perched on the gardenia branch overlooking
hundreds of her wriggling children.
From Issue 11
KAI COGGIN (she/her) is the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Hot Springs, and author of four collections, most recently Mining for Stardust (FlowerSong Press 2021). She is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE grant fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry. Recently awarded the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award, twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year, her fierce and powerful poetry has been nominated six times for The Pushcart Prize, as well as Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Best of the Net 2016, 2018, 2021— awarded in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, The Night Heron Barks, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, Bellevue Literary Review, TAB, Entropy, About Place Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor-at-Large at SWIMM, Associate Editor at The Rise Up Review, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. She lives with her wife and their two dogs in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas.