One fish to fish

Hook

Hooker

Bait

Line and sink her

Red fish

Blue fish

The bass drowns out

The invisible shadow of a shivering minnow

Dripping in silence outside the door

Paralyzed screams

Tapping gently for entrance

Crushed between a string of greasy thumb nails

Muted pauses

Hold your breath over the bridge

Till I’s go numb

Making wasted wishes that drown in the channel

Between solid ground and

I land

Flayed and suffocating on the rock

Waiting for rushing tides to change

And come in

Plucking hooks from bloody gills of

Persecuted Tupperware mothers

Gutted for less than

Two fins an hour

Sputter in the raped and emptied banks

Can’t account for the shattered hollowed walls

Torn veils and crumbled tombs

Her violent halo

Permeates paper thin walls

Endometrial wombs cannot afford your insatiable wound

But it’s your world man,

Owning old enslaved souls

From which you

Take take take

Parasites like barnacles clamped in damp life to dead see

The quahog rake

Scrape scrape scrapes

Stuffs her

Till there’s nothing left but burning sky and the sinew rope of starving veins

To tangle and choke

One fish

To fish

Red fish

Blue fish

~

We ate it. And anyway, I’m blue.

18 thoughts on “Bluefish”

  2. So good. Those innocent Suessian line recast in darkness as a bucket of chum. The play at the end on “fish / to fish”, and Red/Blue. “Tupperware mothers / Gutted for less than / Two fins an hour” is amazing. And OK, yes, eat your blues with the bluefish.

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    • Hey Ren. Always good to hear from you. Of course I’m still here. Writing and reading are my sanctuary. We all need our sanctuaries more now than ever. You’re always welcome.

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    • This morning I was researching something called ‘solution aversion’. We can only see what aligns with our worldview which is steeped in the neurobiology of survival. Sometimes that means we also struggle to see ourselves.

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