By Eliana Franklin
Out to detect the enemy, war submarines send signals across the dark ocean. We forget the whales are listening. In the waves, they wait for sounds of peaceful tides. Instead, explosions disrupt the calm. Seaweed shrinks and shrivels, fish crowd the waters in a frenzy and the whales lose their sense of direction. They wash up on the shore, at the edge of the sea. Ships clash in the night in flashes of fire, orange and white—the whales flail on the land, become impressed in sand.
Eliana Franklin currently works as a teacher in Asheville, NC, and is soon to be an MFA poetry student at UNC Greensboro this fall. She has work published or forthcoming in Pensive Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, and Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry. She can often be found outside, writing poetry about her experiences in the mountains she calls home.