Sink Hole & Fable of the Whale and the Mother

Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Sink Hole 

Driveway washed out. We are done 

drifting from place to blown place.

A silver boat lies like a question on

the side of the road. River keeps rising.  

It is our heritage to continue through:

dust storm, drought, fire, flood, mudslide, earthquake.

The woods around our house lean in listening

for what the seasons have to offer up.

When you re-route a river; re-stitch a

seam. Something breaks.

My grandmother sat close as her radio

spit hate. Even a small spark can ignite.

When you live this close to a river, this

close to the woods, this close to a fault line

better know your way out, fast. How will I

pack all her hate? Once saw a river stitched

into the ceiling. Blue, silver sequins

snaking across; as if change could be caught.

This time we will dig out. Our mouths 

Will be dry, stuffed with feathers.

* * *

Second time the rain washed our driveway out

the brick-red teeth of the road were revealed.

Is this my inheritance? Owls don't come

out in rain, so the sound of our sentinel is gone.

Red bricks cemented together under

three feet of river rock we've shoveled on.

Once the previous inhabitants came

back to sit with the stone-jawed creek.

They never revealed their source. Or, why they'd

hidden statues of Greek goddesses in the walls.

My grandmother could be a low morning

fog that clings to the trembling redwoods.

Or, she could be the minerals beneath

soil that stubbornly hold this whole thing down.

Now that the owls have gone mute. Now that

all we built is washing away: gravel, mud,

the weight of what we've been collecting—

My tongue has gone heavy.  Too many stones

washing down. Now that the skeleton (blood

red bricks) has shown its form. Our underneath.

The rain will keep coming whether we live

or die. We will hold our story down.

Fable of the Whale and the Mother

[Women disappear from this shore into

The bellies of fin-tailed monsters at

An astonishing rate.] Take, for example,

Jonah’s mother, who, inevitably

went looking for her lost boy swallowed by

the whale. Corsets held their structure because

they were ribbed with whale bones. You didn’t know

about the mother, did you? Hadn’t thought

about the cold sea into which she dove–

She never found her boy before she, too,

was swallowed up. What she did find was wreckage

(his) even in the ink dark of the whale’s

belly: apple cores. Charcoal stains. A verse

he had composed. She sat on the whale’s soft tongue

and cried. But the whale had also swallowed

her rage and its bitter itch had begun

to pulse under her skin like a river

searching for its source of sea. She rose to

her thoughts [for they were made of helium]

so light she floated out from the whale’s blow

hole, past sea spray into sky until she

too, like the mothers before her, became

embedded, a jagged, flaming jewel, set

in the glistening ink of the midnight sky. 

[The stars are in their places, and she is

In her Latitude-what-was; Longitude

What-Might-Have-Been-in-different-times.]

*Italicized lines from "Fable of the Whale and the Mother" are from Rue by Kathryn Nuernberger