ate a crow it was the meeting of the loud dark sky and the quiet many cathedrals of the sea. The whale belly is my belly is our belly is the quiet cathedrals full of belly silks I taste a sulking crow in the season I devour many mediocre specimens of us myself
Once a whale
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“Once a Whale” from defensible space/if a crow—: by Ian U Lockaby.
Published by Omnidawn in November, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Ian U Lockaby.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Ian U Lockaby is a poet, translator, and editor of the online journal mercury firs. He’s the author of Defensible Space/if a crow— (Omnidawn) and A Seam of Electricity (Ghost Proposal). Recent work appears in journals such as Ecotone, Denver Quarterly, VOLT, Kenyon Review, FENCE, and West Branch. He lives in New Orleans. He has a website: ianlockaby.com
"Written in the excluded middle between if and then, this gorgeously anarchic serial poem offers not alternative logic, but an alternative to logic. Persisting as 'a threat to the structure,' where 'the structure' is private property or lyric propriety or anthropocentricism, Defensible Space/if a crow— performs a way of being textual that’s meant 'to true / the obligation' to other species while being true to human experience too. Beloved and lovelorn, ecstatic and addicted, outdoors and indoors, we join crows, whales, and termites—air, water, and earth—and reader we fly, swim, and chew through this elemental poetics whose finely tuned lines intertwine human and more-than-human lives and hungers."
—Brian Teare
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