a literary arts journal
Self-Portrait as Whalefall and Windowpane
Alston Tyer
Let me be whalefall, dear sisters.
I don’t know how to be
anything but marine snow.
The unlocked bedroom window
I would crawl through to enter
our house when no one was home
was locked fast one night—broken,
the next. Navigable,
but treacherous. I’m too careful
to cut my hands on what remains
in the pane. I have no traversal,
no selkie skin I could slip into
for a quick escape. Anyways,
I’m not a strong swimmer. Peel
the frame of me away,
what’s left but the basalt carcass
of a lithosphere retreated?
A monster in the way
a waxing crescent is a monster,
the way the first and every
August sunrise is a monster.
Choking down heaves of air silent.
Oh, if I were whalefall I could cry!
But the sun turned the ocean’s
salt and sand to sheets of glass,
still pulled by the tides and wrecked
fast on every cresting wave.
And the air around me is always
the same hollow silence that follows
a tire iron hurled through a window,
once the shards settle on the ground.
Under the waves, the whale can only hear
her blood slowing in her ears,
throughout her body.
She can’t surface for the glass
and sinks. It’s all dress-up, anyways.
Our mother’s sleek black ballet skirt,
her Easter dresses from the ‘70s,
a cowboy hat and bandana,
the snug nestled whaleskin.
A provider only in the dark,
in death—I would take for my own
your cruel fates and think myself
the better for it. But what
am I saying? I don’t want to be
an ecosystem. I don’t want
my name beatified.
I want to scream seawater
and have every window across
the world, at the same time, shatter.
~~~
Alston Tyer (she/her) is a poet and recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was a contributing poet at the 2022 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and her work has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Awards. She currently lives in Chicago, Illinois.