Judy Bankman

yakamoz

is a word that in Turkish, means
            “the reflection of moonlight on water” —                   

a word that actually means a phrase,
            that means the interaction of a cosmic body 

with something unique to planet earth.
            in 2018, the orca whale J35 carried  

her dead newborn calf with her for 17 days
            through the Salish Sea because grief  

is a force like gravity, or inertia; to resist
            is to pledge allegiance 

to another planet, even for a whale.
            at dusk, the other females  

circled round and round and round,
            steadily illuminated by moonlight  

as it shifted on the water,
            inviting yakamoz as the backdrop 

to their collective mourning ritual.
            I want to steal this from the whales, 

to call up yakamoz as the landscape for
            all my moments of grief. to split 

open the kitchen table and find a
            lake underneath, awash in light — 

or when I’m in the car and suddenly struck
            by an old pain, I want the asphalt 

to flood, to make a sailboat of me,
            skimming along the watery glow. 

I want the moon in one pocket
            & the ocean in the other, to roll them 

between my fingers like worry beads,
            hold them close & know  

that when I need them,
            I can cast them out to make yakamoz,  

the word that actually means a phrase,
            the word that is a balm for 

pain as big as a whale’s.

Judy Bankman (she/her) lives with her dog Rosie in Portland, OR on Multnomah, Clackamas, and Kalapuya land. Her work can be found in Yes, Poetry, Souvenir Lit, Linden Avenue, and Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, among others. She was a finalist in the 2020 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Poetry Contest.