“Well, if it doesn’t jell, it isn’t aspic, and this isn’t jellin’!”
—Psycho

Brine shrimp spawn a galaxy in a fishbowl.
Ergo, sea monkeys exist.
So do Higgs bosons and demodex.
These last look like scorpions
and live on the canopy of your eyelashes.
The difference being they’re not sold
at toy stores as a novelty item.
PETA has so far remained notoriously
mum about sea monkeys.
Long before that Nazi sympathizing
corpolite von Braunhut patented his presto shrimp
aquariums in the late ’60’s,
Kubla Khan’s gift to Marco Polo when they first met
was a porcelain bowl of sea monkeys
swimming in unfettered motility.
Michaelangelo sculpted a frieze
of sea monkeys once.
It’s now in one of the nine circles
of the Vatican, next to Pope Joan’s feeldoe.
Lao Tse was fond of traveling with an entourage
of sea monkeys wherever the wind carried him.
This led Confucius to think him
a mad poet beyond his time.
It is a well known fact how highly Jesus thought
of sea monkeys. This explains their fluency
in Aramaic. Sea monkeys, like leaf hoppers
and earwigs, could desperately
use a rebranding. According to Pliny
you’d be hardpressed to find creatures
more congenial than sea monkeys.
In this sense, they fall under
the same category of barnacles, bonobos
and Wallace Shawn.
I’d wager anything My Dinner with Andre
would’ve scored a spanking
10 on IMDB if only
sea monkeys were in the cast.
There’s a UPS package that arrived from
Omaha yesterday from an unknown sender.
I fear the worst.
I’ll say it once more, with bated breath:
sea monkeys exist.

– José Gutiérrez