CAROLYN CHILTON CASAS

HUMPBACK GETS A TASTE OF KAYAK

My nephew texts from an inland state
to ask if I heard what happened
in Avila, the bay close to our home.

I watch the video online, astounded
as a yellow kayak with two women inside
slides completely into the mouth
of a humpback whale.

They must have had a bird’s-eye view
of its pink palate, the jaw’s baleen
a curtain between fiction and reality.

For those minutes they were engulfed
within a giant, were they thinking
it all ends here?

Like Jonah, they were spat out,
only much quicker
than in the Bible story.

They can laugh about their close call now—
one reporting how lucky they were
to lose only their keys, the other
recounting that once on shore,
shaking her shirt, fish came tumbling out.

Carolyn Chilton Casas has lived most of her life on the central coast of California, the perfect
landscape for a love of hiking and playing beach volleyball. Her poetry has been published in
journals such as Braided Way, ONE ART, The Mindful Word, and Third Wednesday and in
anthologies including Out of the Ground and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and
Renewal. More of Carolyn’s work can be found on Facebook or Instagram and in her newest
collection of poetry, Under the Same Sky.