oarfish
when all's said and done,
they will inevitably discard
the ugly, inedible parts.
return what's left of your
silver scales, gut ribbons,
and digested zooplankton.
if it's any consolation,
please know that i have
always found you beautiful
even when they sliced
your gelatinous body and
fed our ravenous mouths.
they called you doomsday
like some biblical harbinger,
but i bet it was terrifying:
your escape from the
pelagic, leaving the dark
and into a starving village.
in the end, no message came,
no subsequent earthquake,
no story, merely our myths.
there is no forgiveness
for a hunger this barbaric,
i know. but after your gift,
we watched the horizon,
our glowing bellies winking
at the lapping waves.
B. Montemayor
B. Montemayor is a poetry & speculative fiction writer from the Philippines, who fell in love with storytelling at the age of 4 through a school poetry recital. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in trampset, Ouch! Collective, & The Spotlong Review.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
This poem feels really in conversation with poems like Marianne Moore's "The Pangolin" or also "The Fish" in its ability to tightly focus on a singular creature, while opening that creature up to the universe. There are just so many tender moments ("please know that i have/always found you beautiful" that pull me through with their specificity and heart. This is a poem that would make any imagist proud.
The use of tercets gives a sense of neatness to the poem that I think counteracts with the image of the oarfish–one could also argue the whole poem acts as a long oarfish with the tercets acting as segments of the body, as if a little of the body is being revealed at a time.
Sit in this poem as you would the lapping waves.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
It just seems like such a strange creature & I thought Taylor might appreciate this as someone who champions poems about animals. :)
When you think about writing an "ode" to an animal that may not be "aesthetically pleasing" how do you approach that on a craft level?
Everything carries a story. Most news reports on oarfish sightings always mention how it signals dangerous seismic activity or how people mythologize it or how oarfish that surface are rarely caught alive due to injury or some form of sickness. I thought it would be interesting to speculate about a lonely animal seeking safety above & instead, finding human civilization. I wanted to paint this sense of dread for having gone on this journey, out from the depths of the ocean, & ultimately meeting its fate. But in the end, I found myself writing from the perspective of someone who understands this dying thing. Sometimes, the strangest of creatures can lend itself to gentleness & beauty & wonder.
Within ecopoetry, the reclamation of animals typically underappreciated seems to be a particular ethos. How do you see your work situated within ecopoetry?
Poetry is such a freeing vehicle to examine relationships & I think extending that sort of vulnerability is a radical step towards empathizing, or even identifying with other animals that inhabit the same space as we do, even if we know very little about them. There's been a flux of conversation surrounding climate change & environmentalism for years now & while I wasn't truly conscious of the implications while working on this piece, I'm hoping to invite curiosity about the roles we play as we engage with the natural world.