whispered the orca to the whiskered bedlamer
as the tinkers and turrs whirred above, broadcasting
the flying news in a dull stunner of a day.
The barneystickles and sea nettles blathered she swarved
past her usual stops near the brickle ice and shuddered
as they watched her misplace currents and flows.
Her maze-headed mind seeks familiar warm places coddled
by winds--but then draws a blank and grows froppish
until she dotes off, click-clacked the sperm whale.
The shoaling of her brain’s mixed layer has led to this confloption
howled the fairy squall as the ocean lost track of its knobbly waters
and no longer recognized whore’s eggs or handlebar kelp.
She’s cuttin’ the curwibbles, tweeted the ticklace and can’t find
her keys. Our dear mother’s head is like a brewis bag!
The other gulls near the landwash fretted and foamed.
What a catty wampus situation, muttered the tangled tuckamore spruce,
that she is so squish-ways. We are all muckered up to our armpits,
and I am shitbaked.
The orca, the bedlamer, the tinkers, and turrs hung their heads
and the whale turned away from the sight of the bent-
over spruce as the banshee wind whirred its dirge.
Louhi Pohjola was born in Montreal, Canada, to Finnish immigrant parents. She was a cell and molecular biologist before teaching sciences and humanities in a small high school in southern Oregon. She is an avid fly-fisherwoman and river rock connoisseur and is obsessed with black holes and octopi. Louhi lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and her temperamental terrier. The latter thinks that he is a cat.
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