This Equation

by Jami Macarty

While your body slouches off-key at wall and floor’s precise angle, all water
freezes from its wanting motion. The last of the great whales migrating from
the Sea of Cortez freeze side-by-side, a white embryo in the female’s womb.
An equation indivisible by both man and beast: the whales’ final blows, a
fountain puncturing a new hemisphere.

The gun shot resounds in the ear’s drum-belly, ricochets into your retreating.
All time makes a mockery at the point of entry, while elsewhere on the planet a
mother calls her child a mistake: the word, a bullet. Fate’s integer incalculable
from wind and wave’s white noise. The person pulling the trigger never hears
the sound.