by Rose Strode

Against the darkness they are so white they seem to shine, these scabby dapplings
on your smooth-as-a-peeled-egg skin, your deeply pleated throat, the edges
of your fins. Once free-swimming larvae, barnacles adhered, then calcified in place.
Now as you grow your flesh swells round them but is also drawn inside in increments—
one cell at a time—until you are embedded in each other, thus proving nothing
is free of parasites. I can’t say if they cause you pain or if they itch, can’t say they slow you down, can't say
you know that they are there, can’t even say precisely
why this bothers me. Deep in the basement of the museum, I cataloged the skulls
of dolphins, thousands collected, flensed, labelled from a century of strandings.
Cleansed of the past, under the lights, they were pure as cast-off shells, yet laced
with osteolytic tunnels where nematodes burrowed through the bone. And back
in my room at home I locked the door when I heard my parents fight. My father’s blows
made the whole house shake, or maybe I was shaking; either way the sounds wormed
into me like the path to Hell, and stayed. O whale! Your name’s a song your mother sings,
but I recognize you by the pattern of your barnacles.

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Rose Strode’s most recent (2021) poems appear in Sugar House, Dillydoun, and the Buddhist Poetry Review. She is a managing editor at Stillhouse Press. When not writing, or helping others with their writing, she wanders around the woods, rehabilitates overgrown gardens, and attempts to learn the mountain dulcimer.