Whale Fall
By Abigail Kirby Conklin
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When a whale eventually dies, it usually sinks to the bottom of the ocean as whale fall and creates a special marine habitat nourished by the dead whale for decades.
—Royal Ontario Museum
How fast, though?
At what speed
does god’s biggest creature,
Gaia’s eldest child,
the school bus’s top
competitor
stop living?
Is there a yawning
cave of sound, like a ship
heaving open
from its heart,
curving downwards
into the hole
of the sea?
Is there
a service? Do the children
attend?
If untouched
by man or tuna net
is it heart
or head
that flattens first
on the ocean’s
ticking monitors?
Who is the last
to hear
the stuttering slow
of the life
in its echo chamber,
the end of a song
falling from the metronome
into unknowable
dark?
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Bio
Abigail Kirby Conklin is an educator and writer currently based in Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of the 2020 chapbook Triage (Duck Lake Books), the Substack "Recently," and a variety of other works that can be found in the Tule Review, Sugar House Review, Elevation Review, Lampeter Review, and Wild Roof Journal. She's online at abigailkirbyconklin.us and @akc_poetry_prints.