Kelly Gray

CETOLOGY


Whales have flexible rib cages that bend without breaking, drawn by design for diving deep without collapsing under pressure. Your rib cage: impossibly rigid with lungs that bleed in deep waters.
Not even that deep in the sea, you and me. If a whale were measuring, we’d be done in the shallows.

 

But the heart of the whale, that car of a heart that beats once every ten seconds. Large enough for us
to find refuge in while we drown. Can you hear it? The impossible whooshing of the greatest pause
of blood on earth in our ears, you curled up in the right aorta, me in the left ventricle, feeling the
surge, counting to ten until our ribs crack, a wall of membrane between us.

 

Kelly Gray's (she/her/hers) resides in a very small cabin on Coast Miwok land with one child and seemingly many creatures, some domestic, some not. She is the author of Instructions for an Animal Body (forthcoming, Moon Tide Press, 2021) and her writing has most recently appeared in The Atticus Review, River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, The Nervous Breakdown and Bracken Magazine, with work forthcoming in Pretty Owl Poetry, 3Elements Review, and CULTURAL WEEKLY. When not teaching she is working on a chapbook of short stories exploring the intersections of love, abuse, tiger paws and knives. To read or listen to her work, visit writekgray.com