Rumbling

If you can hear the whales through your glowing foot roots, then stand up. Open your mouth. Let their aria rip through you. Let it pound up and out so the others can find you. Burrrp! Now’s not the time for politeness, my love. We’re staring down mass extinction. We don’t have time to be cool. Care! It’s fine! There’s a rumbling in your belly. Can you feel it? An inner ocean, still teeming with luminescent jellyfish, dulled by a thin coat of plastic, immortal but dying anyway. For so many their foot roots have withered away somewhere in between an Uber shift and a Door Dash, and besides, their heart, rick-roll racketed by rent scam subscriptions, beats too loud and fast to hear any stupid whales. Exhausted bodies hosting ghosts running on foodless food and godless gods, too sick and tired to look up to see, to know what’s happening in our name, to understand that the cold blue eyes of the empire of whiteness stamped on our every dollar bill that we are forced to pray for fervently each night, “Please God please God Please may I pay my bills God Please may I feed my children God Please may we keep this roof God Please may you give me more money God Please oh money God Please oh please I don’t want to die Please give me your demon dollars Made from the bones of African child slaves Pressed from the meat of the babies of Gaza Printed with the oil made from the blood sacrifices of Chevron Paper gods every one I know not where they come from Or how they are made And I might die of grief if I did Just give me some more of your green demon prayer cards So that I might live Another day, Amen.” That is not you. You pray of course (we all must), but you, you hear the whales. And there are others. You can tell us by the flowers of light sprouting from our eye stalks and noggin crowns, from our bellowing war cries roaring through us giving voice to our blue mama, her rainforest hair slick with oil but beautiful still. Reading by Tim Foley.