Atherton poem
Type
Poetry

Faulkner

 

My mother is a fish. I have buried her three times already, but the water table is high

and she floats to the surface. I cleaned her, using scissors to cut anteriorly through the

bones attached to her pelvic fins, but I can’t cross the river while her cloudy eyes are

directed at the sky. The tackle box is full of the rusty hooks of untried catches. I take a

pitted sinker and use the fishing line to weigh down her fleshy isthmus. There is water

in my shoes but I can feel the stones rise beneath my feet.

 

 

 

Image: Fly fishing tackle box next to stream / Chesapeake Bay Program

 

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Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning poet and the poetry editor for Westerly. She has been a Harvard Visiting Scholar, and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, Tokyo. Cassandra has published eight books, most recently the three-volume Sketch Notes. She has a Creative Victoria grant to write a prose poetry graphic novel on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

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