Orcinus orca

Following the bluefin migration,
with their own languages, dialects,
and cultures passed from elders
to youth in a cycle of learning
that humans cannot understand
outside of terms such as mimicy
and subhuman, this subspecies
swimming the Northern Atlantic
in matriarchal groups revolt against
patriarchal lines dangling
in the water, extending to the new
form of hunting, scientists are split
as to the reason that draws the killers
to damage the vessels’ rudders
and sinking fishing boats: play or
revenge—a behavior whale
watchers fear will spread across
the damaged world despite orca
type, residents, mammal-eating
transients, and those deep-dwellers,
when off the Shetland Islands
an orca rams a yacht. Or at least
we understand it as a need for justice.
Humans plot revenge ourselves,
our impulse to see the world as we are.
When a hornet stung my head,
out of want, I bought a smoker
to stun them underground until
I could flood them out with soap
and water, drowning them until
the earth no longer hummed underfoot.
Don’t ask me where I learned this
thirst. My first sub blowjob? Video
games? Marriage?

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.