manning the ten inch guns behind the concrete battlements of ft. casey with my sister or my girlfriend or some hybrid of the essence of both women, a woman i should trust but don't because she wants to shoot shoot shoot & kill everything within range of our cold metal cannon & its night & we can see in the dark & i'm urging, pleading for her to wait wait wait, before unleashing mass destruction & saying its wrong, its wrong, we shouldn't kill and destroy and inflict carnage & she wants to know who thinks its wrong & i say god does, just wait for a sign & just then a dark gray knife blade slits the skin of the water on the horizon & i jump and point and scream, there, there's your sign & she scoffs, that's no sign, that's just a whale & like magic hundreds of distant dorsal fins prick the sea & still she is skeptical, aiming the cannon now at the pod to take target practice & i'm yelling, wait, wait, don't you see the sign? don't you see? & through clenched teeth she mutters, not a sign, as two whale breech & hurl themselves into the night sky & she still thinks their are no signs & im almost crying wait, wait, don't shoot the whales & she says it's not a sign, there are no signs & all i can ask is wait, wait, wait, wait ...