LAUREN ENDICOTT

ORCA WHALES ARE REALLY DOLPHINS

She could sort toy whales into piles—

toothed, baleen

identify the

click-click-click

death knell of a

common cachalot

At two she knew

rostrum and fluke

Her mind held an ocean

wired as young minds

often are to make order

of what seems too distant

too enormous to be true or

of this world

My mind is where this trivia

now swims. What she kept

is the sound of waves

for which she waits all winter

then crouches in hot sand for

hours to hear. How many truths

has my own brain has let drift—

bloodshot months of chemical

upheaval, wailing infants

the desperate weight

of sleeplessness

Without a written record I

would surely have forgotten

all except the distant ocean

sound of her sleeping breath

then too the otherworldly

scent of a new forehead

for which there is only

one recipe— this my

body can remember

WALKING ON AN EMPTY STREET AT RUSH HOUR

i.

Novel means new, I explain in my new

explaining voice. I am a teacher now

I don’t mention how some parts of this feel timeless—

Dürer’s bony equestrian, herds of rats scheming

in cobblestoned alleys to wipe us out

because I am also a parent and none

of us is sleeping well

She marvels at a fallen leaf. Nearly white, memory

stands in for most of it. I name veins and midrib but

think of tatted curtains in a dusky room, the blouse

my mother wore at Christmas when we gathered—

Nana would like to see this, she says

and she is right, she is a good student

So much is novel in the surgical air of the

post office, I half expect to be asked for a

scalpel as I strain to hand my parcel over

a taped line with held breath

(the lacy specimen

we flattened in an old frame and wrapped in

news of x-ray machines in Milan coughing up

ground glass, cell walls of lungs everywhere

stiffening like ribs of last season’s leaves,

memory of plagues standing in for all

we did not know)

ii.

Years later my father ladles bowls of hot soup

made thick with shins of young cows born

after the world ended. Mom wears an ordinary

miracle of a new shirt, one grandchild on her lap,

the other pointing to the mantle where

from his frame the leaf, a lone horseman

winks at our laughter and the hungry

clatter of spoons

BIOGRAPHY

Lauren Endicott is a lifelong reader and writer of poetry and has recently begun her submission journey. Poems of hers are published or forthcoming in West Trade Review, Duck Head Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, and others. Lauren is also a masters student of social work in the greater Boston area where she lives with her family. (IG@laurenendicottpoet)