Thoughts about Moby-Dick
When I read Moby-Dick in college, I held my breath
for the whale. I liked
how the book was enormous, like
a whale’s size, in my bag,
and what I learned from it:
that we are worse than monsters. I want
animals to be like arm tattoos. I tried
to read
grassland coyotes, for a while,
as horoscopes. I tried saying things like
we’re fine if they’re there
but then they left. The one I mostly saw
was like an unkempt dog——
all fluff and cocked-up
ears, limp
gophers in his mouth. He pulled
them from their holes
like he was pulling weeds, like
he was a secret police force
all his own.
How stupid
I gave him that power. I hate reading
about whaling, about
suffering, blank
rage.
I want the whale to mean
a secret
its blue world fragile as grace.
Some birds flew by here,
their necks folded
and then stretched——seesawing
sky.
Wolf’s Clothes
People always want to tell me
their hard truths.
They fill a glass with them, measure them
finger-deep.
They want tough love.
They want to say the thing that I don’t
want to hear.
There have been times, I’ll say,
when I saw tents
as skin.
When I could rest
my palms against them, find
the heart in the thin wet.
We had those camping wine cups,
then, curved
like the inside of a palm, stiff
metal edge.
We made
our own drinks, rode
in rental boats, put
ice cubes in our wine, lay in cool grass.
There was a tree my friend once loved,
shaped like a woman
in a housedress.
She’s a witch, we said,
one hand
in her own hair.
One hand in ours.
What I’d Rather Talk About
There is the story
about swords
over a king’s head,
and there’s snow
like cartoon hands
on every tree. My son
shows me a video
where a man kicks
down all the snow
and the whole world goes
white, then
clears,
but only slowly and there’s snow
on everything. The man
stands there,
wiping it off
his face and sides.
There is the story
about swords
over a king’s head, but I
first was thinking
how you’d set
that up, how
we hung cell phones
in the Christmas lights so we
could take a picture, wrapping
lights around the branches
and the phones to make things
safe. What
I mean about the swords is
they are there.
In the video,
there is a big brown dog beneath
the tree, and he stands
puffing out the air in glitter clouds.
I went back then
to your hot breath
like a fog
in the night street.
It was the chemo, we all knew,
but didn’t say.
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley and co-edits One Sentence Poems and First Frost. She also works as a librarian at UC Merced. Her work has appeared in many online and print journals and her most recent chapbook, Beach Reading, is available through Bottlecap Press. Her villainous secret identity is Elizadeath, a monster truck with pink and purple glitter flames painted on the sides.
