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Some nights he comes to me
soaked-through, eyelashes
blooming with salt crystals
He tells me about the whale
again, though I don't want
to hear it—how she looked
like the sunken soul
of a ship, so wide
and so bright in the water
How the sea was wild green
and the wind howled the waves
into frenzy
How the whale breached
and he plunged the harpoon
into her rolling side
How she sprayed clouds
of blood, and the air
filled with iron and salt
Some nights I kiss him
to keep him from telling
the rest—how she stove
his boat into splinters,
how he joined other burning
archangels under the sea
Some nights I swim through
his whale heart, so warm
and so dark
*The line burning archangels under the sea is borrowed from D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Whales Weep Not!”
Arden Shostak is an artist and writer from Virginia. He is currently studying sculpture with a concentration in literary arts at Rhode Island School of Design. His writing has been published in Volume One magazine and The College Hill Independent. His work centers dreams, visions, and other elements of the unseen world. Lately, he dreams of pearls, rivers, and dark birds.
ZephyrZ is a computer programmer from Kearns, Utah, and a self-taught artist who uses code and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to create modern art. Since artificial intelligence is already used to generate faces, music, and even poetry, his artistic endeavors continuously explore how machine intuition and program splicing can not only emulate human-created art, but push the boundaries into something original, too. The end result is an ever-evolving process of creation and destruction. Each workpiece is unique, with its own story and personality. You can commission original pieces on his website: https://www.zephyrzart.com.