Whale Bones, by Brandon Rui Shane

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

We are all haunted by our fathers’ bones—by the way the vital sign machine beeps first for someone else, and then for us. Ghosts wander hospitals, knowing that death is never sterile and that the ill do not go without moaning. In these pages, rituals of flesh unfold first as tragedy and then as irony. Death is a strange, strange thing; it arrives through debt, accidental and then purposeful, and through the failing organs hidden beneath a beautiful face that speaks immortality. For those who see the artifice and cannot control the light reflected in their eyes, there is only a return to the honest dignity of birds, as if meeting the space that comforted us before we were alive.

Whale Bones is berthed in Okinawa, Long Beach, and the unknown twenties of a writer who knew the bottle long before ikigai or bitter melon. How to be special once is to become ordinary again. Squid ink before the sac was cut and the blue-black ink spread among the harbor waves. Whale Bones was at first a personal memoir, and then became a practice in becoming something else, how the dead are everywhere, the sunflowers and dandelions, how all we must do is perfect the art of happening, and then, happen.

Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, The Marrow Poetry, One Art Poetry, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English.