You milk a fish
as the year swims by
and America is riding a bear.
The Long Island Sound shelves layers of holy oysters and caviar.
Your fingers are brown and yellow and pink and bloodied
like
a rainbow on an ecologist’s hands.
You get chills when you see the scientists,
Khakis on the Green are marching for a raise.
They are white and old, young and white,
and they are not afraid.
Your father called you in a panic when he heard.
You’re not like them. You are the
silent kind.
It’s true—you are the quiet kind.
You would sooner swim sludge pools than shout.
But tides are rising,
and a fire festers within you.
This morning, you canned 200 fish into a
pan with tall rims and sun-warmed
sides.
Sacred, they shat themselves.
Their vents burst as men to a stroke.
On the 95, you giggled silently to yourself.
I milked a fish. Bubble tea pearls fell out of her.
An alewife is no maiden, but it feels kinder to say it
so. The city people grant these fish no dignity.
On land, your head is pounding.
The man on the mic, one million miles away, is
celebrating and you groan because today is all work and no play:
It is the first of May.
Your feet are wet, they smell like marsh, and wasn’t it March, just
yesterday? The summer never stops. The water runs. The fields swell
and ebb.
There is poison at their stomping
feet. When fish suffocate, they
swallow air and gulp at nothing.
— Michelle So
Illustration by Lu Arie.
