Zalophus californianus
“I swore I drank your piss that night to see if I could live…”
          –from “I’m Still Your Fag” by Broken Social Scene

Your howlings begin plaintive
then roar. You muscle,
joy and sinew to wend
from rock into blue delight—
Shaitan, you twist to unhook fish
from men’s lines cast. The casters
hate your ears but dress wives
in your fur. They profit
from your wind of foreflipper
and swish. I’m three-quarters tired
of performing for crowds
you say and dive. Imagine
before plumping to seven hundred
seventy pounds pounds,
you feared the element
that allows agile grace. I want
buoyancy like you, immunity,
but as a man-of-war, a squid:
mythic and pursued. Once
your hands were opened
to my hands. I gave you
a carved stone—
red and gold like rays bleaching
your beard. I wanted
your teeth to puncture
my bone. Be valiant, pup,
glide and gambol
amid aquatic crash,
bark and clapmatch. Good, free
boy. The sea will change you
not into barrels of oil
but into floundering bliss.
No one will inflate
your streamlines into catamaran,
sealing season is done
so free your flip
among kelp beds—
Flop on the sand, the sea
crystals on your fur,
on your hair of flax,
king of mischief,
cheating lover.

Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023), Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.