Blue whales are going quiet

say the oceanographers who take readings from the deep. The idea
is perhaps whales no longer have anything to say to us, our motors
buzzing the music from the water, our drills killing the medium.
Food is scarce so they spend their time searching instead of singing.
In my local coffee shop, I type this poem into my phone as a Muzak
adaptation of The Smiths begs to let me get what I want this time. It
doesn’t carry with the emotional whine leeched out. I still like this
coffee shop. I wake up early to come here and be the only one.
Something about a sunrise makes me believe in the magic of trying.
I read, this morning about the seekings of hungry whales, sip my latte
and get ready to talk to teenagers about colleges, their options
futuring in arcs before us. I try to convince them their paragraphs
of resume soup hold no water. Try to think of just one time, I beg,
one time you felt the world turn you new. And please please please
write that. Have you ever seen a movie? I wish I could show them
Linklater’s Boyhood, filmed over 10 Texas summers. That scene
where the boy asks his dad if elves and fairies are real, and Ethan
Hawke asks back: What if I told you a blue whale’s heart is the size of a car?  
A whole car?  Its heart?

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Kimberly Gibson-Tran holds two degrees in linguistics and has recent writing appearing or forthcoming in 2River, New Verse Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Passages North, Third Coast, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.