In the belly of the whale

By Julia McMullen

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The green of land is a distant memory.
First, the creaking of the ship,
Then, blue, white, sea-green foam:
As the ocean groaned with my presence,
My very bones became quicksand
There in the roaring, slipping down.

My eyes stung with salt;
I didn’t feel the brush of teeth,
Leviathan in the deep, snarling
For me, before I could become a fish,
Before I could become smooth like
Sea-glass from the waves,

My skeleton, for that is all I am,
Now a skeleton
within a skeleton,
green bile swelling up around
me in the dim, red flesh walls oozing
with decay…
​
I pray for a swell,
for a sign from God,
that this whale is a miracle
and not a curse,
that God found me refuge
in an unlikely prison.

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Julia McMullen is a poet living in the Midwest USA with her husband and young son. When she isn't writing or mothering, she enjoys singing at her local church and tending to her garden.

Julia's other work on Foreshadow:
Red Sea (Poetry, August 2023)
Locusts (Poetry, September 2023)