Welcome to the Whale Inn
The beachside motel is whale-themed & the bedsprings
yowl their metal-metal kiss like it’s any of our business.
There are shells in the bathroom, white cupped shells
to hold the soap if the soap wants to be held. We sit
on the floor spinning the shells in tilted circles talking
about whales. In the sea (the other beachside, the liquid
darker double of the air we swim in) the whales are singing.
The whales are upset that humans invented music theory
& refuse to learn that nonsense, they say we will sing
how we please, as we always have, we were the mood
music for the asteroid strike & the funeral dirge
for the great collapsing lizards, we have been harmonizing
all these millennia, while you have been doing—
this? These concrete cliffs, these iron spines, this
racetrack towards the glorious prize of
extinction? And in the bathroom, where we sit,
these paintings & this bath mat & this shower
curtain: whales swimming by forever in the air—
but what is a whale, to us, really, but a great gray blob
or a lucky fin or swooping tail or blast of sea-salt
water, what is a whale but an uncoded monster,
a thing of such distance, descriptions, abstractions
slipping from the gray silk of its skin—but no.
The whales are out there, & do not care what we think,
us strange small monsters in our monster shelter
& the cars slumbering always just outside, the whales
glide the depths like an open sky & their voices
echo out sentience that we could never hope to
understand, crossing our silly two legs against
the cold slick of bathroom tile, while in the sea,
we think or know or hope, the whales sing for no one
but themselves.
yowl their metal-metal kiss like it’s any of our business.
There are shells in the bathroom, white cupped shells
to hold the soap if the soap wants to be held. We sit
on the floor spinning the shells in tilted circles talking
about whales. In the sea (the other beachside, the liquid
darker double of the air we swim in) the whales are singing.
The whales are upset that humans invented music theory
& refuse to learn that nonsense, they say we will sing
how we please, as we always have, we were the mood
music for the asteroid strike & the funeral dirge
for the great collapsing lizards, we have been harmonizing
all these millennia, while you have been doing—
this? These concrete cliffs, these iron spines, this
racetrack towards the glorious prize of
extinction? And in the bathroom, where we sit,
these paintings & this bath mat & this shower
curtain: whales swimming by forever in the air—
but what is a whale, to us, really, but a great gray blob
or a lucky fin or swooping tail or blast of sea-salt
water, what is a whale but an uncoded monster,
a thing of such distance, descriptions, abstractions
slipping from the gray silk of its skin—but no.
The whales are out there, & do not care what we think,
us strange small monsters in our monster shelter
& the cars slumbering always just outside, the whales
glide the depths like an open sky & their voices
echo out sentience that we could never hope to
understand, crossing our silly two legs against
the cold slick of bathroom tile, while in the sea,
we think or know or hope, the whales sing for no one
but themselves.
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant studying creative writing in Portland, Oregon. Their work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Beaver Magazine, Anthropocene Poetry, Gone Lawn, and the Hooghly Review, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. They are a mediocre guitarist, an awe-inspiring procrastinator, and a truly terrible swimmer.
Beaver Magazine 