Fish Eye

Let the Fish Swim Free!

HARPOON
Harry’s, Virginia Beach,

Has an oyster bar and a hostess,
Window tables,
Domestic bottled beer,
Condiments
in recycled six packs.

A fish in a tank.

A fish in a tank.

A large and living
fish in a tank.

One green eye
on the side,
a wafer-thin,
body, mottled, brown on brown.

A round, communicative eye,
without cinders, without guilt,
without glint of understanding
of unconscioniable acts,
entrapment, imprisonment,
solitary confinement.

Why
Life endures,
Ten years
of murky slime-festooned water,
in a locked-up ecosystem,
swim-squeezed with oxygen apparatus.

No stone privacy,
No gravel for poking
No species of its own to attract
as its bluish spots iridesce to green,

No spawn-pit digging.
No, no, no
competition,
no invigoration,

No empathetic brush with likeness,
Except the eye, the diner’s eye.
My eye
Hears its story,

“I am a mud sun fish.
My dorsal fin is rayed. I hug the bottom
of a slow-moving stream. I was spawned

in salt water,
journeyed to fresh
river darting.”

The fish remembers

the frenzy of the catch, the snag of the hook,
the slicing,
sound and suction, the hard light, rush of smacking air out of
water
hard into the rusting bucket, the banging boat ride among
side-floating-fellow-Fish stench,
intoxicating gasoline hours
Sinking, bobbing, air touch, callused hands grabbing
Flesh on tender scales,
Dump drop to tank for
restaurant ornamentation.

Shocked quiet fills with reverberating,
exhaustive heartless bass.
Creatures swill beer at the bar.
Without words for its own thirst, Fish Eye
Watches through a block of tainted water,
its dreary forever.

Its vision siren so Loud, it pierces my eye.
It breaks to a pure microcosmic tear, rife
For fish to swim free,
To swim free,
To swim free

Elizabeth Madden-Zibman