Whale Aria
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Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize and finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (2019), which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award. His essays can be found in places like Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, Bamboo Ridge Journal, Moko Magazine, Cherry Tree, Kweli, and others, and he has a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays 2018. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
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Whale Aria - Rajiv Mohabir
ALSO BY RAJIV MOHABIR
POETRY
The Taxidermist’s Cut
The Cowherd’s Son
Cutlish
NONFICTION
Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir
TRANSLATION
I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara
whale aria
POEMS
RAJIV MOHABIR
FOUR WAY BOOKS
TRIBECA
Copyright 2023 Rajiv Mohabir
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mohabir, Rajiv, author.
Title: Whale aria / Rajiv Mohabir.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023004567 (print) | LCCN 2023004568 (ebook) | ISBN 9781954245686 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781954245693 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Whales--Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3613.O376 W53 2023 (print) | LCC PS3613.O376 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6--dc23/eng/20230206
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004567
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023004568
This book is manufactured in the United States of America and printed on acid-free paper.
Four Way Books is a not-for-profit literary press. We are grateful for the assistance we receive from individual donors, public arts agencies, and private foundations including the NEA, NEA Cares, Literary Arts Emergency Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
We are a proud member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
for Jordan Andrew Miles
CONTENTS
Dominion
Boy with Baleen for Teeth
Immigrant Aria
Whale Story
Boy-Not-Boy
Humpback Vocalizations
Underwater Acoustics
Whalesong
Golden Record
Ancestor
Oral History
Cultural Revolution
Orient Aria
Natural Aesthetics
Interpreting Behaviors
Sacrament
Anatomy Lesson
Vestigial Bones
Inside the Belly
Museum
Dissecting the Tay Whale
Carcass
Birah
Dream
Ghost Aria
Sound Navigation and Ranging
Blowhole
Plastivore
Stomach Full of Trash
Comeback
Return Migration
Shift to Silence
Why Whales Are Back in New York City
Notes
DOMINION
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
—Genesis 1:26
Let there be light
skins and colored
skins. One to rule
the other.
A mandrake quickens
into greed-grab,
tears a page
from Genesis. Clods
of earth are clods
of God. Clods of earth
are clods of dendrites with dirt
skirting the ribs.
Memory of the untouched
is the more beautiful object.
From the streets
gashed bodies lament
this justice, burn-scarred
lives owned by light.
I strike a candle
against ruin, against
the separation of day
and night.
BOY WITH BALEEN FOR TEETH
My father wished
to cast me back-
wards caste and