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In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.

The van’s front windows were slathered with blood, and inside, a whole brood of furry lapdogs were going wild. They leapt over the captain’s chair, running along the dash and gauges, and the dogs were soaked in blood, their fur syrup-streaked, their whiskers drooping with it. One lapdog was desperately pawing red streaks on the glass, so that the driver’s window was greasy with a thick, dirty paste.

The bowhead whale lives for centuries and could potentially grow forever. Researchers say their spines don’t set, so even at two hundred years of age they might still grow. Yesterday, through a dear friend, a complete stranger gifted me a whale vertebra that might be from the eternally possible spine of a bowhead whale. 

What a heavy piece of oracle. Yes. Honor the bowhead whale whose large proportion of body fat keeps them warm enough in the Arctic to outlive the various weapons used to kill them over time. I have said it before, I will say it again, fat is a winning strategy. New research suggests that young bowhead whales may even take nutrients from their bones, to further grow their baleen (the food filters in their mouths) in order to be able to eat more krill, grow more fat, live more better. Evolutionary geniuses. 

My own backbone has been teaching me something too. My pediatricians diagnosed me with scoliosis as a school-aged child, and we may never know if I was born this gorgeously crooked or if the early weight of heavy books caused a shift in how I would carry myself through this life. What we do know? The books certainly were heavy and I haven’t yet put them down. And also I walk, sit, and move in the world in a way that overstretches part of me, compresses the other side.

At my desk, with my pen, pencil, markers, ruler, and thick white paper, I was in command. And when I drew the superhero who was my alter-ego, I gave him—i.e., myself—what in all my shyness I didn’t have: a girlfriend. She was as pretty as my limited skills could make her. Her name was Laura.

The shambles of the gods stretches for miles,

a salvage yard where the smell of hot chrome rises,

where finned bodies lie beached and rusting,

and their names recall great chiefs

and tribes and the empowering animals.

Thunderbird, Winnebago, Mustang, Pontiac –

you must say these names out loud. You must

strip the radios in which the myths survive.

Repeat: Wi-Yuh returns to abolish the custom of killing

the beasts for their names. Leave the road maps

on the dashboards. Learn the song of spawning fish.

            Once, when I was a very little girl in a bubble bath, I asked my father why I had a belly button. He was sitting on the toilet lid reading while I splashed. He peered at me over the top of his book.

             “So you know where your center is,” he said.

           “Why do I need to know where my center is?” I asked.

            “So you don’t lose your balance,” he said. “Your center is where all the different parts of who you are come together. It used to connect you to your mother and to the beginning of human history in Africa.” I cannot be certain this is true, but when I remember him saying this, I hear his voice catch on the word mother.