Christine Choi

Blue Whale: Oratorio for Three or More Voices

Personal Aesthetic statement:

The engineers, carving swallows from destruction, take flight. Machine animals craft themselves after specific music. In my inter-genre short fiction, I investigate human imaginations striving to learn something about survival. I am interested in the use of simple melodic lines and candid diction to compose fragmented narratives; works that welcome the reader to tread the ever-shifting fragile boundary between prose and poetry. I experiment with framing and organizing fluid lyric prose within sequential sections named with a discursive, near-scientific tone; a cohesive structural element that can guide audiences through unpredictable and disorienting terrain while simultaneously propelling narrative on a unique, parallel register. My work investigates the flow of lineage—familial influence, biological and cultural evolution—and the complex transmissions of emotionality therein. I'm interested in storytelling as orientation-practice, as naming truth in an increasingly technological, confusing world where our human animal instincts require trust. In my writing, I treat emotional activity not as byproducts of a grounded experience, but rather as their own, careful animals. Language is lovely on the tongue. May we continue to invent new forms that adapt and respond to now—such is the bonding agent of thinking, feeling, human animal communities.

***

I. MIGRATORY BLUE WHALES SPEND THE WINTER SEETHING IN LOW LATITUDE WATERS.

I took my friend J down, but then he asked to be pinned back up. I took J down, and then he pinned himself to my front. Think of the dancing! And all the sweeteners we haven't tried. I water a plant, color a bird yellow, and look up to find him gone.

J is right to take me for a burrowing animal. You are always right! I fold my hands to wait for his return.

Not arriving, I start digging:

II. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES ALLOWED THE FIGURES TO PURSUE THE WHALE.

Consider these corners: The bus bulb on Hayes and Lyon where I called you from. The Wednesday street cleaning spot, the animal in my chest, and then others moving in.

These comfortable edges between your steps and mine. "Stop talking," you say, and I catch myself running again, like an old tepid faucet.

"Buses are road whales," J texted once, before I even knew that lifting images could declare such truths. I stood waiting for the bus. He thrived mysteriously in Providence, drinking tea, writing music, and screwing the waitress with tragic makeup under her eyes.

When I left, I pulled the door closed after a seeping foreigner with a laptop in her lap: "He will meet me!" she screams, voice curdling. She —curled and falling into the precipice between two incongruent images; her body pressed against the bedframe.

[chorus]
The morning after I left,
I didn't feel the earth shift;
I raced down runways, lifting tape
Lifting a lush, ragged coast.
But when you drifted into the scene,
Suspended like a dialtone,
Everything changed—

III. VISION AND SMELL ARE LIMITED, HEARING IS SENSITIVE.

I ask J,
Can you sing the song about Ukko Noa for me?
He is pulling on his wrapping for the day and
looks up, lifts his large plastic phone.

Hi! hi!

           Then, Ukko Noa gets up to stretch. The sun turns. He catches writhing animals
           while I am writing him into grey sky. He can taste the young foreigner's accent
           on his tongue. From the privacy of his own genre, he rinses the animals and
           leaves them in the sand. The various local species of electronic animals in our
           ocean all sort of look the same. He steps into the sauna and throws his shorts
           on the peg.

IV. BLUE WHALES VOCALIZE EXTREMELY LOW FREQUENCIES AT NEAR-DEAFENING VOLUMES.

Ukko Noa becomes a site for pre-conception. With unsteady eyes, he invites the foreigner to go out dancing. They are already drunk with a dread they co-name Something. They put on Saturday clothes and scurry down to the corner to wait for the bus.

V. IN THE SPRING, THEY MOVE TOWARDS THE POLES.

J entered the story on a ship when I was seventeen. We stumbled upon each other in a carpeted hallway, each with an empty ice bucket in our arms. Words ruffling off our tongues as we walked together to look for the machine.

Mostly, J is paper. I am constantly shuffling on the floor, packing and re-packing my pockets for the day. Mostly fiber. Sometimes a thin conductive thread—into thin air—running like a schoolgirl. And about once a year, he unexpectedly writes back.

Hi! hi!

I'm working on a song about the whales poster!
he pronounces.

This feels ripe.

VI. THE SOUND CARRIES FOR THOUSANDS OF MILES, CREATING A SONIC MAP OF DISTANT OCEANIC FEATURES.

And the Rock Island Skua, J explains, markets himself as a gull, politely evading extinction. We stand holding hands at the edge of the dusky paper landscape, watching birds swoop headlong into the water. And the child in the stroller with the beautifully dressed mom peeks inside, learning the smell of espresso. We hatch ourselves in the beet patch again, this overgrown field where we were never married. We render the night more colorful by ordering Fisher Price salad niçoise. I pick at it, over thick discussions in fire-dancing. Empires are burning.

[chorus]
The morning after my dream,
I didn't feel the earth split in two;
I raced through pastures, catching grasshoppers,
Leading a beet by its leaves.
But when you entered the room
Kindly, explaining simple math,
Everything changed—

VII. AFTER TWENTY YEARS OF TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION, BLUE WHALES WERE DRIVEN TO THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION.

Every time Ukko Noa came to her house, his favorite thing to do was sharpen knives. The foreigner hated it. Because Ukko Noa would always cut himself and bleed all over the tiles. In return, the knives stayed reliably sharp for twenty years. "Well-developed foreclaws," he pronounced, "breed highly evolved offspring." He gifts her a set of characteristic rodent incisors, yellow and always visible.

VIII. THEY FEED IN SUMMER'S WATERS.

We're restless when the fireflies come.

There is a photograph—whose camera?—taken of us munching ice. The hallway becomes a picnic spread on J's apartment floor in Manhattan—beer, olives, bowls of ice, and sweets. Think of the dancing! And the lyrics we haven't yet tried to pronounce! Our bodies with short fur, small ears and eyes, a naked tail, and large fur-lined cheek pouches. These pouches, extending from cheeks to shoulders, are crammed with our sprouting correspondence, bedding for nests.

I gift J a whales poster, full of information, and a few red daisies from the store on the corner, full of light. Mid-afternoon, I arrive at your nest loaded up with bags, sweating with effort. I follow a trail of caramels from the parting elevator doors to the wardrobe where you are hiding. You've seen my place before? A hug, a glass of water, two bowls of multigrain flakes, a sunken sensation. I don't want to tell you that I've been arriving at your nest once a year for the past six years. Instead, I imagine cooking you beet greens. What nourishes you? You fill plastic chests with your concert programs, home-grown electronics, and postcards depicting yourself holding a small machine.

Later, we stand at the edge of the field with moondust on our tires, watching the Rock Island Skua swoop headlong towards the water, then, halting at the surface, contort elegantly upward. We are still strapped to our helmets. You a feel phantom animal trapped in your chest hair; I feel tides colliding. It is summer, and somewhere back in charted territory, there bloom nectarines and black cherries that you can taste before they reach your mouth.

IX. IT IS NOT YET CLEAR THAT THE BLUE WHALE WILL ESCAPE EXTINCTION.

I don't know why but you save me; you with your high ideas and thoughtless dancing, purple suit jacket a few sizes too big. You, at home—stirring up electrolytes and setting traps that play songs for mice. What if the weeping foreigner that I left in my house last night really did have a future with Ukko Noa, who set sail for a distant fishing island, leaving his houseplant behind? When I wrap my limbs around you, a molten form altogether, you hold out lettuce made from recycled plastic bags. The answer is futuristic and simple. I feed gratefully from your hand without speaking.

My heart is pounding as I wait for Whale.
I'm loading up my equipment! J unravels into the dotted line that always spans between
us. The performance will be held in the opera house, crystalline fans filling every velvet
crevice. Followed by a reception on top of a car in Providence. He has two hours to find
an LED screen to accompany his music. It could display an encounter in black waters.
Or a deep joke. Can you hold on?
Website, he says, Upcoming Performance Times.

A waves breaks in our private plastic galaxy.

[chorus]
The morning after we spoke,
I didn't feel the earth split in two;
I raced through traffic, chasing you,
Dragging a parcel by rope.
But when you entered the room
Dancing, cords wrapped around your head,
Everything changed—

X. BLUE WHALES, BY VIRTUE OF THEIR EXTREME SIZE AND REMOTE HABITAT, HAVE VIRTUALLY NO NATURAL PREDATORS.

Stepping down from the whale's mouth, you will have just come from roller-skating. You don't have proper shoes! This you will shout from the back of the bus like a rabid rodent. The fur of a burrowing animal can lie either forward or backward, enabling the animal to move about in its burrow equally well in both directions.

XI. LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT INTRASPECIFIC COMMUNICATION.

J fell down a ravine. Now all we have is a fearfully frigid look-alike figure of similar shape. Who let him fall down the ravine!? A bunch of people. One thing led to another and it all happened very fast. He hung there from one arm, swinging treacherously, gently, then dropped. But not before giving a pep talk:

          The animal/bus stops at Baker & McAllister
          cultivates foliage:

                                                             Oh to look—
          swing from [                           ]—
          toward
                      tromping, usual flight, habitat.

I remember standing at the video store. Snow on the ground,
in the Whales aisle. J's in the background leaping off handmade bookshelves
landing gleefully, knee-first into the snow banks.
Gradually, he draws a crowd.

XII. LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT BREEDING GROUNDS.

I am put to work in a bag factory. The sewers are downstairs, lunch steam rising from the honeypot in the center. The sun is out—another hot day. Ukko Noa will be here soon, pronounces the Foreigner, her chocolate brown hair pulled up onto her head full of heirloom tomatoes.

Time passes like traffic;
                                 there was no superhero to save us
                                 there in the bag factory.

Did you see? Wasn't he wearing claws or cleats?

The animal has yellow teeth!
                                            she clacks in thick accent,
flame flickering from her teeth.
Five words spill onto the concrete floor,
not penetrating the surface.

XIII. INCREASING OCEAN NOISE MAY MAKE IT HARDER FOR WHALES TO COMMUNICATE.

My friend,
I thought you said there were to be no more wars.
You drew a line with your ball point pen—
a cancerous mass rolled across the surface
picking up thoughts, dogs, houses, and clouds.

Each day, the task here is to save something and take it home—
our herds, our hands, thrust deep into zippered pouches,
our muses, aging mothers,
the robots, the terrorists—
Shouldn't we hire them? Shouldn't we run?

To the roof!
                       cry the elders,
screeching their hearts back with gasp,
Let's make something! They march
across the rice fields, dragging a parcel by rope.

Ukko Noa stalks the forest seeking
pollinators, examples of mutualistic relationships.
He invites her to swim in the river,
even though the sign says POTABLE SOURCE.
Do not say something funny
                                            he warns with a sneer,
unless you mean to ignite the brush.

The Foreigner and I work in a street-level warehouse.
Beneath the street,
there are bogs of heat, graveyards of crusts,
lunchcrews warming their meals with asphalt;
there are abandoned machines with cleats and claws
that failed to save us from extinction.

The parcel contains trolls and animal hair,
to fear and touch,
and a note: EVERYTHING IS FLAMMABLE.

Teacher,
I whisper sleepily with my head in your lap.
You have such large, lovely ears.
You wear a suit jacket made of sod.
I brush a sleepy hand
towards sunlight striping the sheets
Lines from your letters echo like a banshee—
A work of art is a projection of the artist's soul,
You smile and call me Something.

You don't want some 13-yr old buying your work as if it were a videogame.
You say nothing about the war, the elders climbing up and up,
or elk herds migrating South.

But friend, can't we make crepes from paper?

A song about a whales poster, J replies,

The reactionary surface is striking;
the line drawn in sand where the netted animals lie
perforates,
splits.

[chorus]
The morning after my dream,
I didn't feel the earth split in two;
I raced through traffic, chasing flukes,
biding time with seams to sew.
But when you entered the room,
clacked across the floorboards, everything changed—
and there is nothing to eat.

XIV. THE SOUND CARRIES FOR THOUSANDS OF MILES, CREATING AN IMAGE.

You appear to me in dream
curled sideways facing the screen, our bodies
pressed together in the foreground
of a common human habitat. The others are out running—
haircuts, sodapop, windy drives—
and remain peripheral.
                                            This scene plays exactly twice:
once at the beginning of the dream, once at the end. In between,
I name you and your sidekick Passing Through.

Are you here to save me from edges of extinction?
The bus! It's finally here.

You sleep through it all in the wardrobe,
heavy oak double doors parting—
tiny living quarters in the hull of a ship.

I wake up, Saturday, drenched in light,
curled nonsensically between two incongruent images—
and lift the two scenes up:

Hi hi!

Twenty years ticker past—gallery openings, trips to Austin, Chicago, Reykjavik—live performances circling home soiled and mediated by amps, poetry—handwritten and addressed to you —stillness, something hard to come by—at times, acknowledging another figure gently in passing seems enough. Chopping lettuce together in silence. The low voices distilled from silence is instructional, not social, on how to navigate stillness. You stumble over words—full of pebbles—a schoolboy.
Why can't I speak today? This is so weird.
And in the middle of my painting a scene of washing lettuce together in perfectly pregnant silence, your mother calls on the other line—I thought I might come up there later today—that would be fun—across thousands of miles and a little north and then, back to basic instructions on how to prep lettuce for silence.

There you are:
a hovering shape across the miles.
This morning after you appeared to me in dream, I've added a voice, carefully articulated complex notions, a charted sonic plan. I'm irrational, I offer up, painting a portrait of myself flipping a coin towards the whales. I offer myself in smoke at your premature business ambitions. Perhaps between the two of us, we can form a rope between two trees. I tell you about the habitat with the screen, delicately carving out the foreground in which our bodies are curling. Me and my sidekick were playing Megaman II, you pronounce, instantly filling in with two heroes, their tactile forms leaping through electronic landscapes.

"Fun," I say, and anything is possible.

XV. THEY HEAD TOWARD THE EQUATOR IN THE FALL.

The Rock Island Skua, it turns out, is a made up bird; two pets in breathable weekend totes. Today is security level orange. Tomorrow, I will see you; you will compliment my hair and talk about lo-fi sound. Maybe we'll learn a language, or project white light onto the most ordinary wall. I imagine a potted Christmas tree and a chalky brown rug for nesting, like the mourning doves I see hiding fearfully in the community garden. The homeless man and his bowl of oranges. The espresso machine built by the same family that built my bike. I left a girl weeping pulling a laptop out of its sleeve. "I am making Something," she says into the cool fall air.

Christine Choi received an MFA in Writing from the California College of the Arts (CCA), and was the school's 2008 All-College-Honors Scholarship recipient for poetry. Her second chapbook, Clockwork and Onions, was released by One Bean Press in the Fall of 2008.

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