In Leeuwenhoek’s first letter to the Royal Society of London he described the stingers of bees. Later: lake water with its green spirogyalgae, the plaque between his teeth, skin cells, sperm cells, protists, rotifers, blood cells drifting through the capillaries of an eel. When I read his letters, I feel like we could love each other forever.

Even though A. Bengalensis’s eggs can gestate in a nest of a single drop, it is useful to remember those eggs are as thick with yolk as any. The mating pair had mouthparts connected to a set of antennae that together formed a hooked, spiny proboscis they used to sucker into a fish’s operculum where they fed on mucus and sloughed-off scales. To find each other they had to detach from this host and swim with their four pairs of thoracic appendages awkwardly attached to the carapaced oval of their bodies, peering around the water with pronounced compound eyes.

Sometimes I don’t know how I can keep being here. Like we are nebulae and this house is the paper of a seed husk. Like to love is to drift a jellyfish through a starry pelagic zone of all the space between us. Like this lonely glass grinder wrote letters to kings and princes and czars about what he found putting his scabs under this device he calls a micro-scope.

So small P. Roseola crawls through the gelatinous water with her cilia, devouring the whites of the eggs in this nest. She has five eyes, antennae, a brain, esophagus, and stomach. Leeuwenhoek was mesmerized by the concentric circles of her rotating teeth. I can't stop thinking about the retro-cerebral organ consisting of two glands on either side of the medical sac. Whatever the function of this other bifurcated bit of a brain, we think we know we can't imagine it.

Once this was a parasitic relationship that made P. fat and A. scarce and then vice versa. Like how there are rabbit years and then fox years then starving fox years then rabbit years once more. But they changed. Now P. exercises restraint, eating open the eggs from which a new A. and another A. and A. and A. and A. and A. spring forth into the water, hungry already for a fish to sink the hooks of their antennae into.

Because there is no way to live without each other, as they hang from that fish’s face, they too will become hosts to nematodes burrowing through them into the jaw and down to the fish’s intestines.

The fish is a home or the fish is a god or the fish is some barely conceivable dimension or wasting away on the hook with guts full of worms or the water is glowing tonight with bioluminescent algae or the glittering spume on the waves is the souls of mermaids extincted you could say or just never understood by human eyes to be what they are.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of three collections of poetry—Rue is forthcoming from BOA in 2020. The End of Pink (BOA 2016) won the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. In addition she has written a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past (The Ohio State University Press, 2017). A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, American Antiquarian Society, Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, she teaches in the creative writing program at University of Minnesota.