Unusual Mortality Event

by Jessica Guzman

There’s more than one way to gut

a whale. There’re more than two gulfs

skimming the innards. In a gulp of sea 

there’s more lithium than mercury, 

more fervor than phthalates & 

names left for what ashes 

seed the shore. The salt carves

more prophecies, promontories

adjunct to the entrails unfurled 

over dunes. Cigarette buds. Solitude. 

Sometimes the quickest way 

around is a ruse: Odysseus jumped 

to his shield, passed fate on

to another & another body. There’s more than 

nylon etching fin & fluke. Wind hisses through 

polyethylene blooms & what doesn’t 

calcify threads new cockles, 

murmurs rain. More edges than sand

translates. Odysseus couldn’t help

himself, he was a man & men love

technicalities. There must be a first—

gull riving sclera from skin, or blowfly

slurping baleen bristles, or wake, 

like a widow, scouring the scars. 

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Jessica Guzman is the author of Adelante (Switchback Books, 2020), selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the Gatewood Prize. Her poems have appeared in Quarterly West, 32 Poems, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She teaches at Widener University and lives in Philadelphia.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash