Feed
- Feed
whales, feed, poetry, Laura McCullough
In a drone video of humpbacks feeding off the coast of Canada,the surface of the ocean is frothed into blossoms. Whales blow bubbles.The voiceover explains toroidal vortexes
surround fish in a net, herding them into a bait ball. I think maybe someare just for pleasure because as a girl, under a tree coming into bloom,its leaves so translucent
light seemed to rain over me, I never felt so alone or so alive.History is full of bloodshed and acrimony, and, like long marriage,cycles predictably. Maybe
it is no surprise scientists discovered a large, interconnected funguswhere the end of one individual blurs into where another begins.Today, at the beach, a shark sighting
thirty feet out; lifeguards whistle fiercely, aide-memoire things swim unseen around us.Once we thought the blue whale the biggest animal until the found fungusmade us adjust our worldview.
When the lifeguard's whistle cut the air, we all thrashed out of the water,and my husband and I stood [End Page 44] scanning the surface for fins.When they let us back in, he stayed
on the wrack line, slim zone of skate cases, shells, and Styrofoam;nothing would lure him back in. Around me others were throwing themselvesinto the swallowing mouths
of the coming waves, to be spit out again.I kept rising up from the bottom as if launching from elemental darkinto elemental light
with pleasure. It's true honey mushrooms can become so massive,their sweet fruiting bodies blossom up from the groundsometimes miles apart from each other.
In the whale video, the singing enthralled me, but knowing soundexcites bubbles in liquid, exploding bursts of light to blind fishso they can't escape being eaten
only intellectualizes what I feel. I can't help lovingthe word sonoluminescence and wonder, if the fish could get away,would they even try? [End Page 45]
laura mccullough is a poet and prose writer whose essays, memoirs, stories, and poetry have appeared in places such as Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Guernica, PANK, Gulf Coast, Writer's Chronicle, and others. Her recent books include Jersey Mercy; an edited anthology, A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race; and Rigger Death & Hoist Another. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey, and is on the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low-res MFA. She is founding editor of Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations.
