Brit: Moby Dick Chapter 58

by Jessica Cuello

He thought the sea was his
to disturb and disturb.

My whale mouth swam open,
naked through vast yellow fields.
My appetite made swathes of blue.

In my cannibal sea, we eat our own
and we get eaten.

I thought reaching for one another
we reached the same land—
water aside, waves trembling.
I thought rest. Rest and devour,
quiet as rocks.

You heard the murmur of the fields;
you quivered in your skin.
You said, Get dressed.
I thought how sad men were
stepping with legs
into their pants.

I thought how sad men were
vulnerable in their heads

amassing
what they couldn’t eat.

Jessica Cuello’s first book, Pricking (Tiger Bark Press 2016), won the 2017 CNY Book Award. Her second collection, Hunt, was the winner of The 2016 Washington Prize from The Word Works. Jessica is also the author of the chapbooks My Father’s Bargain (2015), By Fire (2013), and Curie (2011). She has been the recipient of The New Letters Poetry Prize and a Saltonstall Fellowship.