Somerville Poet Tara Skurtu.

Somerville Poet Tara Skurtu studied Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, and is an MFA candidate at Boston University. She’s the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a 2012 Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize finalist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Review, Hanging Loose, Salamander, Poet Lore, The Los Angeles Review, Hiram Poetry Review, The Southeast Review,The Comstock Review, Amethyst Arsenic, and elsewhere.

The Amoeba Game

I stood at the stove holding

a wooden spoon in my right hand,

listening to butter sputtering against

the splattered circle of an egg. Perhaps

it was the flapping of the egg’s

wavy edges against the steel pan,

or the amorphousness of its innards

outside the carriage of its brown shell—

I remembered an odd game I played

in Brownies. The amoeba game.

In the front yard of the scout cabin,

one girl at a time would become

an amoeba and lead the rest.

We didn’t know what amoebas were,

only that they weren’t human or animal,

and moved like a thousand blind legs

treading through molasses.

So it was that our heads and arms

became legs and feet, undulating

wayward into dusk. Swaying our shoulders

left to right, we’d giggle through mouths

we weren’t supposed to have, pretending

we had no eyes and didn’t know where

we came from or where we were going.

– Tara Skurtu

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