A pregnant sperm whale washed up dead on a beach in Sardinia, stomach full of plastic. 48 pounds. One flip-flop, many drinking straws. In my student’s PowerPoint, the pregnant whale opened on the shores. I touch my stomach, feel my cesarean scar. In our northern classroom snow falls outside and that was a long time ago, when my body was opened in a Manhattan hospital that’s been renamed. I was twenty-four and in the video his father made, moments after he was born, I say to him, over and over again, hello, hello, sounding twenty-four. Saying, hello, hello, drawing him to me as if he was not beginning his slow leaving, but arriving. In class, we watch scientists dig gloved hands in the dead whale. They lift a rubber soled shoe from her, another.