Donika Kelly

Downhill, a skeleton of an orca 

suspended: a female beached; belly full, 

at that time, of seal and fish; the seal and fish 

full, at that time of poison. The volunteer, 

white bob, soft face, knew too the desire 

to see a body—its echoes—suspended. 

Hope, the name given to a dead whale once 

located by clicks and whistles in echo 

in inlet in open sea. The volunteer 

tells me she visited the Smithsonian 

Museum of African American 

History— says, The saddest part, to me, 

the Emmett Till—do you know him?— exhibit. 

The whale, killer, weakened by a scaffold 

of old poison: DDT, PCBs, 

which no prey can process but holds in its fat 

its tissues its soft parts. See her Southern 

scaffold: Mississippi, Alabama, 

Georgia. See, I hadn’t thought to think 

of him here, under the reconstructed 

skeleton I had come to see, and once

seen, to mourn. She wanted to stand over 

his bones, his grave on her bucket list. 

She pushed into me her desire, 

the sound surfacing what had, long ago, 

leached into my softest parts. I wanted

to hold her shoulders, vomit into her mouth

this water full of dead or dying,

to fill her with a little knowing, 

change her, heavy her, let the knowing wash 

her into the Salish at low tide, past driftwood 

and eel grass, hope a warning at her back.