Ash Adams

Echolocation

In torture, it is called futility music

when soldiers repeat one song
over and over in the dark.
Eventually, a prisoner forgets
who and where they are,

the way bats become lost
and whales die in the din
of chronic sound,

and each time I hear someone say
there’s too much noise these days

or 40,000 dead
only assholes call the police in 2024
we’re all eating lead anyways

I wonder about the science of futility—

of what goes into finding
the number of times it takes
I love you you love me
to become a weapon—

because I’m serious:
if one more woman cries out
you don’t believe me?
it will be one more woman.

If one more hospital bombed.
If one more field.

When a boy shares cellphone images
because his people are dying

my instinct is to say I love you
over and over again
but to me, he’s already dead
and to him, I was never alive.

Forgive me: I wanted to write a poem
about bats and whales,
but instead I am writing about death
because I cannot save you
and I am watching you die.

It turns out knowing
either too much or too little
leads to paralysis and conspiracy,
everything close to everything else

yet far apart, as in any darkness or ocean
from which a whale hauls onto sand,
an oversized, deflated heart in the sun.

Still, I want to know things,
about war, about whales—
killer whales who capsize yachts.

I swear I can hear them,
the ship of them:

If you cannot hear, we will say it louder.
If you will not answer, we will crash into you.

Tell me, when you feel the shape
you make in water, do you believe
you can change the ocean?

No, of course not:
you dance with the waves,
the tide, the moon,
joyfully fighting for your life.

Can you hear them?

Ash Adams is a poet as well as a photojournalist for national and international media based in Alaska. Her photography has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and many others. Her poems have been listed as finalist for Indiana Review’s 2023 Poetry Prize, the Steve Kowit Poetry Award, The Montreal International Poetry Prize, and Fish Publishing’s poetry annual. Her work was listed on the “highly commended works” list in the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize. She is working on her first book of poetry, a meditation on survival.