Me, 34 y/o SWF, bisexual, lonely, wearing a red windbreaker on a boat. You, a whale of a character, your big personality and flippant tail, waving near us, unmissable. I think you’ll carry my idea of you back to the watery floor.
I think of Spongebob, Finding Nemo, The Little Mermaid, how my friend in middle school scandalized about a coral penis illustration on the Disney videotape cassette box before it was, as she said, “banned.” I think about a whole body of literature devoted to your demise. How my search for you required wrangling, diving, and I lose my mammalian divewear, though no matter how much I remove, there’s hair on my skin, I’m part of the band.
I left the Midwest hoping to find someone resembling your distant unpredictability, men whose vowels don’t sound like my cousins, someone who’s lived near the ocean and thus understands my long search. Not from Waukesha or Portage or Door County or Two Rivers or Beaver Dam, but the Salish Sea or Spokane or Olympia. Or maybe it’s not that you’re different, but that I can try on a different self, another suit.
You, a skeleton washed ashore, rot off bones. You with phalanges like me, a piercing tail, reconstructed skeleton. Near here, I met someone’s niece, a sound engineer from LA. In the desert, she’s not exactly testing bombs but devising a contained way to make a car-sized hunk explode.
I think about a whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling in a natural museum of curiosities near the courthouse in Milwaukee. Drawers of birds and beetles pinned to white cotton with a label each and a swatch of cheetah hair you could run your palm over like a neighbor’s pet as it runs into the house. On a boat, connected to the floorboards, so still so far from you, I think about the atrium at that museum for butterflies, how when they opened their wings, we delighted at their living.
Freesia McKee writes about gender, genre, history, and place. Her work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Journal, The Ploughshares Blog, Cream City Review, and other venues, including three chapbooks. Freesia serves as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.