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Poem About Gutting a Fish

by Johanna May

This poem could be tackled
from several perspectives:

if you scry the knife,
it says no meat
no matter the arrogance—
does not part itself humbly,
bleedingly,
upon such sharp insistence,
such efficient silver silent.

The fish blankly stares
nothing inherits its memories.
Nothing that could speak.
Not the hook, not the mossy crevice
where it blinked and left roe,
soon to flit into its own many versions
unaware of a mother
or that to divest of itself is to be one.

It should be the bloody hand—
whose forebears made the first prototype
of knives, from what rocks, and
giving no recourse to the fish’s ancestors
but to give up legs and slink away to water
to eventually evolve gills,
Much like its sister, the bird, grew wings
to fly away.

This hand should have the upper
if to follow natural inclination of higher
evolved species—
To sculpt from evolution a weapon
as well, a pen: to scrape from history
the bloody gristle of the kill,
and poetry to commit these acts
so gracefully.

01/06/2013

Posted on 01/06/2013
Copyright © 2024 Johanna May

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by George Hoerner on 01/13/13 at 05:34 PM

But it is the knife of the mind that cuts the deepest and with a jagged edge to boot. We survive the only way we know. By stealing life from those who give it up. Be fish, fowl, or potatoes for they all have feelings and a soul.

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