SOUNDING

beached by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner

and if the documents are true then even the whalers
avoided us. they slid past these islands, whittled
without rivers from gods living in shallow trunks of ni.
whales were hunted for the simplest pleasure - a light
and meat. greenlandic hands offer me whale the same way
i am offered turtle back home - in tradition,
in ceremony. how later, conquerors stripped the sacred,
left a soured carcass of commodity. simple pleasures
plundered and masticated. destruction takes
many forms - persistent floods besiege us from all sides
even here, in this meeting. we cross and crisscross an ocean
of documents meant to charter an unfiltered future. destruction
takes the form of bolded words :
Decides
Urges
Requests
three abysmal sounding lines for compassion
in august whales die in maui without hawaiian hands
to soothe them into soft darkness. if it was a marshallese
shoreline the beached whales would signal a chiefly death -
harbingers of loss and damage. cost analysis of disemboweled
paperwork. how do we decide the proper response to a room
full of sharks in suits. they can smell the brown in our blood,
the native in our speech. they offer thickets of false solutions,
strategies without navigational aides. i spent the meeting
searching for the simplest pleasures - you, a light to guide
the thin meat of my paper heart. i could interpret your movements
less than our enemies on all sides. over and over i asked you
to decide your position. i urged you to reassess your motivations.
i stood naked as a shoreline,
requesting the simplest pleasures.

threshold
Noʻu Revilla
a mass stranding I could not deliver the poem the Navy
determined that vessels involved in training&testing might
strike&kill endangered blue whales I could never find poetry in
the Bible a mass ready to be surveilled, ready to be measured
like the sound of water crashing from our eyes poetry limited
to islands I could not deliver the poem instead this threshold
of baskets, this wall, door, something to swing open I could
not deliver a legacy of outstretched palms in the Bible sound
waves measure the ocean floor in the Navy sound waves
measure damage to land&reef systems in the Pacific where
do you find faith? the poem pulls you deeper deliver a cord
hanging deeper the poem so deep it is ghost blue&swims to the
end of the poem a chiefly death rhythms across the room the
Bible crashing inside the poem waters the poem deep blue waters
I could never find in authorized mor(t)alities deliver the poem the
brown in our blood the Native in our speech another mat
basket never find another stranded marine mammal poetry
might strike poetry might kill the “no action” poem the “no
action” poem dies here

sounding