Shauna Hargrove
Whalebone
It never felt like a spine,
calcified metal rod that should
hold her head aloft,
keep her gaze at eye level,
hang the rest of her out
over the earth like a
long ivory hook;
instead, a suspended beam,
soaked shipwreck resting
unsettled in a coral trench,
flashes of silver darting
through and around as she
pushed through hours, yielding.
Her grandmother always
nudging her cavernous ribs,
prodding her up in church pews
and uncomfortable chairs in
precious dining rooms,
the wood gleaming dark as thunder
and the fragile china birds
swallowing their songs
until her expansive hips
swung safely past their perches.
She noticed it in others,
this genetic respect for
structure and form,
angles where her own were
missing, round, a
misprinted map from
the closeout bin in
a dusty thrift store,
waiting hopefully against
disintegration for
a thrilled touch from
a collector, a shared
gasp at discovery, salvation,
Sitting straight, the patience
of a tree, Grimm's perched on
her wilting brown curls on long
Sunday afternoons;
becoming a statue among
the foreign landscape of
sun and wind was
barely possible for her
but she tried with everything
inside of her, burned away
hours playing at lamppost
for three or four seconds of
her mother's eyes, warming
before gazing cool away.
It was only the silent cover
of night where she really
felt whole, recognized and
accepted and part of another,
larger thing; she'd
lay back, her physical space
insignificant floating on
the dark velvet cloud of her bed,
rest her ear against the
smooth, pink-and-white shell
she kept near her pillow,
and listen closely for the sounds
of her others, calling from the
calmest depths of the ocean,
singing to her the story of her origin
and of her eventual returning,
rattling her whale girl bones
home to sleep.
