Rajiv Mohabir
Associate Editor Molly Reid: To my deep shame, I don’t read enough poetry. As a fiction writer, I tend to get impatient with books of poetry—where is the story? I want to feel something. But I recently picked up Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut, and I couldn’t stop reading. The poems in this book are alive, sizzling and glittering and dangerous. So I am thrilled to feature some of Mohabir’s work for this week’s miCRo. We chose two poems instead of the usual one because we believe they work well together, both looking at the interplay between human and Cetacea, self and other, delving into the ways we search for meaning—and mine the world in that search, which always comes at a cost. Mohabir interrogates our responsibility in the realms of science and elegy, in our pursuit for knowledge and awe: “Why must we still slay / before we recognize beauty?” I dare you to read these and not feel something.
To hear Rajiv Mohabir read his poem “Dissecting the Tay Whale,” click below:
Dissecting the Tay Whale
You must first lance and kill a whale to know it. Like John Struthers, the anatomist, cut open the Tay Whale, to write his tome, naming the beast Megaptera longimana before humpbacks were loved for their wings’ charismatic topside slaps. Why must we still slay before we recognize beauty? A baleen-giant pierced from a whaleboat, a sailor scrimshaws on its own bone. Of sea’s plenty, what can I tell, empire’s engine- rev rolls coal: plumes of exhaust, not spume. And if I trill of the beautiful, is it already belly-up; words spun into a question, then image and cadence of inquiry of what was once supple, now staid, now drying?
To hear Rajiv Mohabir read his poem “Odonticetiphilia” click below:
Odontocetiphilia
Peter, the bottlenose isolated from the sea, has no choice: for Delphinidae, breathing is voluntary. He falls in love with a human, Howe Lovatt, his only living contact during a ten-week experiment in 1965. After access to females proves too great an interruption to lessons on human speech, she pleasures her captive, now called Pete, manually. After the bond shatters and Lovatt publishes her findings, she admits sex with Tursiops truncatus to be precious, even gentle. Pete sinks to the bottom of his tank and refuses air.
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017). His book of translations I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) is forthcoming from Kaya Press in November, 2018. His poems appear in Best American Poetry, POETRY, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Quarterly West. He received his MFA in poetry and translation from at Queens College, CUNY, and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at Auburn University and translations editor at Waxwing Journal. Read more about him at www.rajivmohabir.com
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