2 Poems by Rosalind Shoopmann
All Hands on Deck
The answer is to just kill him, to shoot
him with the gun or throw him to the sea.
At this point, they can only save the boat
if someone starts them mutineering,
which Starbuck knows. He knows how this all ends,
the captain’s course killing them all unless
they kill the captain first. In self-defense,
of course. Extreme action born of duress.
But there’s no procedure for mutiny, so,
despite his protests, he capitulates
to every whim the captain has. Although
the men would be with him, he can’t break rank:
he’s too devoted to the law to see
that sometimes it is honored in the breach.
I Don’t Smoke and I’m not a Lumberjack, so Driving is the Most Dangerous Thing I Do
* A previous version of I don’t smoke and I’m not a Lumberjack, So Driving is the Most Dangerous Thing I Do was first published by Bullshit Lit
When Moby-Dick first came out, readers complained that the narrative chapters were boring but they generally liked all the stuff about whale biology. Isn’t that funny? Take a right at the light. It’s the opposite of what people say about the book today. Personally, I love how it doubles as a cetology textbook—we’re turning at this stop sign—but I understand why most people don’t. You have to imagine being an 1850s person who has seen a whale and wants to convey what this was like in a time before photography, before encyclopedias became widely accessible. All people know is that it’s just a big-ass fish or some shit, but Melville wants you to know better. Get onto the 8 up here. Melville wants his readers to know how the whale’s brow alone makes “you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature” not because the whale is immeasurable but for the opposite reason, yeah? Because the whale is endlessly measurable. We’ll get onto the 805 eventually, so keep an eye out for that. Measurement renders concrete the creature’s majesty, the terror and awe it inspires just by existing as it does, describing the base facts of its biology and behaviors to force his reader to confront that which study can only ever render less comprehensible. Merge up there. Only through the unthinkable scale of the whale in general can Melville guide us to the right response to Moby-Dick specifically, a whale that is intelligent and malign, even infernal. By illustrating this scale Melville shows us—and this is important; get onto the 805—show his reader the right response to Moby-Dick just as a whale! “So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby-Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” That’s a direct quotation. Moby-Dick doesn’t stand for anything but Moby-Dick. We’ll take exit 23 pretty soon.
Then we’ll just go straight for a while. Thanks again for the ride—sometimes driving makes me want to puke!
Do you ever think about how somebody in our lifetime will be the last person who ever sees a whale? I read an article about this last year: not much is going to make it through acidification. Whales won’t. They just aren’t gonna be around much longer. Left at the end of this block. Melville’s contemporaries might not’ve seen whales but at least they had the same ocean. Can’t say that for anybody who reads him a hundred years from now. Soon there’ll be more plastic than fish. Food web collapse as the water corrodes shelled creatures. Dead zones the size of continents! Please let me out here. Goodnight.
Rosalind Shoopmann currently lives in San Diego and works as a secretary at an immigration law firm. Later this year she'll be moving to start a PhD at UCLA. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, The Disappointed Housewife, Boats Against the Current, and elsewhere.