the orca and the surrogate

By Carolyn Cheng ’24

did you know that while orca fathers will raise the offspring of other orcas,
they will never raise their own?

they will jump to play house with another child, but never glance at the one left alone?
perhaps i like to romanticize a dog-eat-dog world,
for i too often blanket the edges of interlocking teeth
with a blued baby idea of the calves,
             silent and clinging to their mothers,
watching giant dorsal fins shrink with each minute
                                                                                                                                                              into the blue
 
now, you're no marine biologist,
but you keep a leather-bound,
gold-edged folio of the man and the world in your back pocket so you can squeeze this story in, so listen here:
the night you taught your children to catch fireflies in mason jars,
Connecticut summer sticky sweet in the open palms of
bucket hat hands, one hand clutching a Frog and Toad book,
one closing the screen door behind, you
never looked back, never saw me,
the girl breaking off a crumb in hopes the sweetness would cancel out solitude,
you never could have seen
 
my dad, ripping car ads out of magazine pages,
Chinese literature in waxed capitalism, sweetened by
mooncakes of cyan, magenta, yellow, blacked over here,
this is how you fold a paper airplane,
this is how I teach you to bottle childhood by setting it free.
 
so we'd send creatures of ink and cartridge to their deaths under the guise
they would fall into a century-long slumber,
sleep always sweeter than death for
the curse is broken when the prince awakens the princess,
the hibernation ends and the fireflies will breathe summer into the night,
the orca, my father,
will one day see
that fathers do not need to doom themselves to solitude
much less their children
 
no, you never could have seen
but let me take a chocolate chip cookie home,
let me stay just a few seconds more,
let me have this one footnote in the story of your life
before you send me off to sea, to go and search for the lie that fathers
are separate from nature
 
let me play house in my head for a while
before the orca comes back.