Fishy Memory
Past the mangroves, my fins thwack roots, stir up mud. I catch a bright worm but it’s sharp as a bone and catches in my mouth. Before I know it, I’m paddling backwards as hard as I can. But I’m losing. The sea spins and spins and the water blinds until I’m up in a brightness so dry I can’t breathe.
An octopus with only four tentacles rips out the sharp worm with the tip of a tentacle and drops me into a cramp cave that’s wet and dark. Surrounded by not quite rock, I’m trapped between darkness and death, dreaming of shoaling with my siblings and finding a school of plankton, but before I could eat, I’m hit with blinding light and a tentacle pinning me down on the hard bed of a dried-out sea floor.
WHA-ACK!
After the pain, I feel scraping inside and out. Finally, a tentacle drops what’s left of me into a freezing sea and lays me on my side, where I lie unable to move or feel. All I can do is hope to wake up. Do you have this memory? It feels so universal I suspect everyone does.
Kingfishers
With no teeth or jawbones, birds can’t chew. I ran like a chicken in grade school and the kids called me ‘chicken legs’. In high school, jocks daunted me—
how their fanning hair and muscular personalities reeled in the cool chicks. Hestia’s father ate his own children, including infant Hestia, saved only when young Zeus
forced their father to disgorge his siblings. In high school, my nickname shortened to ’chicky’, a gangster-sounding name—respectable. Were a bird to swallow a fish tailfirst,
the fins would fan out and it would choke. Our senior year starting quarterback Brad shot and killed his sweetheart when she broke up with him on their first day in college.
When I read about the murder in my dorm room three- thousand miles away, my nicknames came chirping back to me, like a sea of kingfishers flipping their fish up
into the air to swallow headfirst. This morning, beneath a newsprint photo of a thin balding man between two beefy guards, an update on Brad’s parole quest against
the desire of the victim’s family. How decades pass. How one trauma fades while another destroys lives. The long nose of Japan’s bullet trains is modeled after
the kingfisher’s long beak. I see Hestia, now the virgin goddess of homemaking, hovering over Olympus, lifting the lid off the pot of her trauma. We all have to
work with the teeth, jaws, legs, people (or lack thereof) we’re given. Brad’s parole was denied again and I force myself to jog twenty minutes every afternoon.
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Plume Poetry, Threepenny Review, TAB Journal, Moon City Review, Sugar House Review, Terrain.org, Rattle, Constellations, and I-70 Review, among others. Kenton writes from Northern California.