by B.M. Owens
Imagine swimming in a pool. No, imagine living in that pool. Imagine that pool being all that exists in the world to you. The pool is your world and your world is 35 feet wide and 12-20 feet deep. You are 20 feet long and swim in constant circles as children bang on the see-through glass tank. High pitched whistles sound and you breach but you’re not sure why. You’re given food. That’s why. You continue your circles, you’re making something. The water laps around the sides. Your fins guide the water with incantations others don’t understand—you don’t really understand them either. You swim and swim and you’re still here, swimming. A whirl pool forms at the center. This is it—You charge toward it, hoping the water sucks you in. That it’ll tear holes into the bottom of the tank—into reality. That it’ll pluck and sweep you into deep waters. That it’ll bring you home out to the Pacific ocean or, at least, drown you. But it doesn’t. The water settles. Your body is stiff as you float beneath the Florida sun. Maybe if you’re still enough the heat will melt your blubber and you can ooze out of here through the drains. The sun only blisters your skin but you don’t seek shade because you already know there isn’t any. This is all there is—this pool is your world.
Your name was Tokitae and you once dived almost 500 feet with your pod off Puget Sound but now you’re here at Miami Seaquarium and they call you Lolita. You can smell the Atlantic ocean. You can hear its sounds—laps of waves clapping against each other. Fish and their echoes of movement. You’re in this pool but you can feel the sounds of an ocean you never knew. The gulls call out to you in a language that’s familiar but forgotten. They try to tell you news of family on the other side of the continent. How your sisters and cousins have had multiple still born calves. How the dead bodies float at the surface, like the way you float in this pool. How their mothers carry them—push them with the tips of their noses. Gently prodding them to swim. The gulls tell you of the diminishing salmon supply. About the humans taking too much—the way they always take too much. The gulls tell you about the islands of trash they’ve seen. They try to tell you about the noise pollution. But their beaks can’t make the sounds human sonar makes. And even if they could, you wouldn’t understand. None of these sounds are familiar anymore.
You were taken from the Pacific ocean at four years old and sold for $20,000 in 1970. You don’t know what money is or what years are. There is no time keeping in your world—whales don’t use money in wild or captive worlds. Except you’re here to make money. You are a commodity. As long as you wave your flipper and breach and splash just enough. As long as the audience claps for you. As long as you don’t attack the trainers, they’ll make sure you’re well fed.
The two white sided dolphins you share the tank with understand less than you do. But they care less because they have each other. You don’t talk to them. If they swim close to you, you swim away. You haven’t seen another orca in years. For all you know, you’re the last orca in the world—you’re at least the last orca in your world.
You shared the tank with Hugo, a male orca from Puget Sound, for the first ten years of captivity. He helped you remember your family. He brought the sounds of home here. He felt familiar. You’d fuck him constantly. What else is there to do in here? But you never had a calf of your own. You knew this was no place to raise a young whale. You knew they’d take your baby away from you. That your calf would grow up in another small tank. Your calf would be different from you—your calf would never know any ocean.
It was all too much and not enough for Hugo. Maybe you weren’t enough for him. There’s not enough of anything in here. He liked to ram his head into the tank. Maybe he thought if he hit the tank hard enough, he could shift its location on earth—tip the two of you into the Atlantic. Maybe he was creating a language—a pattern of bangs, calling out to kin. Maybe he thought he could expand the tank himself. Maybe he thought this would tell the humans that two orcas couldn’t live here. One orca couldn’t live here—this couldn’t be your entire world. He kept ramming into the tank—into the hands of children banging on the viewing windows that have signs that say please don’t bang on the glass. Once he almost tore off his rostrum—they had to surgically re-attach his upper jaw. Maybe he thought he could tear himself apart. Maybe he thought the pieces of him would find their way back to the ocean. His dorsal fin flopped over and he continued to bang against the tank as you coped by swimming in circles—unable to stop him. Unable to help him. Unable to do anything else.
Hugo died of a brain aneurism and they dumped his remains into the Miami-Dade landfill. Vultures picked at his flesh as the sun boiled away his blubber, sticking to fragments of plastic and cardboard and spoiled food. He lies in unrest in an ocean of trash and you don’t know it, but that’s where you’ll end up too. Groups of activists are fighting in courts about your rights—they sign petitions. Protest. Post posters on billboards. Write essays. But even if they win, captive whales forget how to live in the ocean.
After two decades in captivity, Keiko, the whale actor in Free Willy earned enough money from his captivity—he performed enough so they decided he could return home to Iceland. After years of therapy in a contained cove, where humans tried to teach him to catch his own fish again, they released him into the open ocean. He never found his family and he never socialized with other whales and he never remembered how to be a whale. In 2003, Keiko died of pneumonia. His body, at least, now rests on a quiet seabed inside the hearth of the ocean.
But you’ll never pay off your debts. You’re not a whale actress and your ticket sales are too low—if they were too high, Miami would never let you go. No, your entire world is this pool and there are no other fish or whales or oceans. So, you swim in circles, around the tank—casting circles of incantations. Spells to forget. Spiraling whirlpools surround you until you remember, again, this is your world. Stop—and float still.
B.M. Owens received her MFA in poetry from Florida International University. Her work has been published in Salamander Magazine, Small Orange Journal, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She was a finalist for the 2022 Academy of American Poets Prize, and has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. Her forthcoming chapbook, Don’t Be Another Girl, is a semi-finalist in the 2022 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition and will be published through Finishing Line Press.
Hawaii Pacific Review 