All posts tagged: May 2025

Fathom

By SARA RYAN

 

Photo courtesy of author.

Norfolk, Virginia/Virginia Beach, Virginia

 

When the whales wash up on shore, my friend grieves. I feel it too, but it feels further away. Deep in me, treading water, legs furiously churning under the surface. The first whale washes up on the oceanfront, just off the boardwalk. People drive out to stare at it. Its dark wet form deflates into the sand. I dont drive to find it but think of it all day.

I scroll through the Facebook comments that claim its all the fault of the offshore windmills, the sonic waves mapping the ocean floor pummeling through the ocean. Everybody seems to have watched the same hoax-y documentary funded by the oil industry. But of course, its the boats. The whales scarred and torn up by container ships. 165,000 tons of steel running into migration paths.

I tell my friend how they necropsy the whale, cut it from tip to tail—they call it peeling the banana.” Then, they cut it into small pieces and bury it right on the beach. My friend wails but Im not sure how real her emotion is. She wants to dig into the beach to find the bones. She disappears from my life just as quickly as she shimmered into it—she goes to the swamp in Florida and never returns.

I am alone again, and another whale washes up. And another. And another. In the Outer Banks, a minke whale. Another, a juvenile humpback female. A common cause of death is entanglement—shattered vertebrae, inability to swim, caught in fishing nets. I, too, feel very tangled up. I cannot put into words the size of the sadness I feel.

I look at the striped belly of the humpback whale. Her huge frowning mouth. In a YouTube video, the waves push her back and forth on the sand, but she never returns to the water. She likely weighs over two thousand pounds.

I am afraid for myself and the whales. I am afraid for my friend, who worries that she will accidentally kill the child that she hopes for. Before her disappearance, every Tuesday and Thursday at lunch, she tells me she wants to die. There are only so many times I can hear it before I stop sleeping. She pours everything into me.

I cry on the shore, just looking for somewhere to put my sadness. Everything that fills me up. I am floating like a buoy, gathering barnacles and gulls. I become a shell, a hollow tube strung through with wire.

Only two windmills have been constructed in the ocean off the coast of Virginia Beach, over twenty-six miles from the shore. Some people, dining at the rooftop restaurant of the oceanfront Marriott swear they can see them turning. Still, the birds continue singing.

Facebook commenters continue posting:
where are the spineless wastes of oxygen who care so much about this planet”
the sonar”
the windmills”
heartbreaking”
this is no mystery”
stop lying
all those kids with a photo of a dead whale on their phone”

Norfolk, Virginia, is home to the largest naval base in the world. The ships are being built in a circle around the city—the banging never ceases. Every man I meet works for the shipyard or on base. Many of them never sail the ocean, but they build upon it.

The gales churn across the state and flood the streets with water. The cement walls in my building weep with moisture. A whale skull washes up on a beach in North Carolina and the news article is titled, Oh, Whale!” I want to tell my friend, but she is already too far away, wandering the aisles of IKEA, looking at baby blankets, thinking about dying.

I think it is only inevitable before we see each other on the beach. On an oily downtown street, getting watery iced teas. At the local museum, staring at strings of floating pink glass. 

The whales skull is gray and dark—it looks like a stone from an alien world. I wish I could pick it up and carry it. Seven whales wash up on the East Coast in thirty-eight days, and everyone is screaming. It is so easy to invent an apocalypse. I, too, sometimes wish the world was ending.

I watch an ant crawl across my notebook on the table outside the coffee shop and it is a smallness I cannot fathom. In the same way, I stare at the schooners docked at the harbor festival—all the ropes tangling and flapping in the strong winds. Ill never know where they lead.

A fathom measures how deep the water is—the unit of measure is six feet. It comes from the Old English word meaning outstretched arms.” Perhaps it is an embrace, a closeness, as our hands stretch further and further apart.

 

 

 

Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves and the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity. Her work has been published in Brevity, Kenyon Review, Diode, and others. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Wesleyan University.

Fathom
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Crafts Like the Old Country

By NINA SEMCZUK

That morning Irina Pychenko found herself in the ditch, again. It was the fourth time in a month.

“Third time this week I’ve found someone right here,” said the gentleman outside of her window, who was hooking a chain to the tow hitch under the back bumper. She had barely finished mashing her grill into the snow when he’d pulled over. “You wouldn’t believe how many people haven’t got their snow tires on yet.” His words made white puffs in the air, holding his speech like cartoon captions. “You neither,” he said, kicking her half bald Buick tires.

Crafts Like the Old Country
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The Moon as a Beacon of Human Earnestness: A Conversation Between Boston Gordon and July Westhale

In poet JULY WESTHALE’s upcoming book, moon moon, humanity finds itself in a precarious position—Earth has become unlivable, forcing people to seek refuge elsewhere. But when the moon proves overcrowded, humanity pushes even further, settling on the mysterious and perhaps astronomically dubious moon’s moon. Part modern epic, part ecological elegy, the collection tackles eco-grief, climate change, and human hubris, all while weaving humor throughout its poetic narrative.

July Westhale, whose earlier books include the autobiographical exploration of class warfare in California, Trailer Trash, and the intense poetic meditation on desire and divinity, Via Negativa (praised as “stunning” by Publishers Weekly), brings their signature incisiveness and wit to this timely new work. They also released the recent Unmade Hearts: My Sor Juana, a delicious translation of the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Today, Westhale converses with poet BOSTON GORDON, author of Glory Holes and the forthcoming Loose Bricks. Gordon, who also champions queer and trans voices through Philadelphia’s acclaimed “You Can’t Kill A Poet” reading series, guides this thoughtful discussion as they delve into meditations on writing, the moon, and what poetry teaches us about ourselves. 

You can pre-order moon moon here

The Moon as a Beacon of Human Earnestness: A Conversation Between Boston Gordon and July Westhale
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Raffia Memory

By LILY LLOYD BURKHALTER

The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.  

Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.  

Raffia Memory
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Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place 

By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

Amman is not incidental. The sayl, the stream that patiently carved a path between seven hills for thousands of years, drew—as waterways often do—the din of life. It was somewhere close to here that the Ain Ghazal statues were found. Nine thousand years old, captivating in their simplicity, they seem to be about to speak as you contemplate their black-tar eyes, the details of their fine features, their square torsos and solid limbs. 

 

Amman: The Heaviness and Lightness of Place 
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Target Island

By MARIAH RIGG

Fifty-eight years before Harrison’s granddaughter is born, the U.S. government drops a two-thousand-pound bomb on the island of Kaho‘olawe. It is 1948. On Maui, the shock from the bomb is so strong that it shatters the glass of the living room window, and Harrison, a baby still in his crib, starts wailing in time with the family mutt.

Target Island
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