From the book:
Sculpin
We’re fishing for flounder
in Scituate harbor when I pull up
a sculpin, causing Uncle Sid to curse
while smashing the creature repeatedly
with a wooden club that’s been rolling
around in the rowboat – sculpin
thrashing, club rebounding off its slimy
sides, briny water spraying in every
direction. My uncle’s bald head flushes
red. The fish seems indestructible.
Its jaws jut, its eyes bulge, horny warts
cover its body like armor, this dragon
lured from the depths
by one little girl, and a middle-aged
man who is trying to slay it. No good
for eating, he mutters, or even bait.
It steals bait. Nothing but bones inside.
And he does slay it. The popped-out
eyes glaze over, the jaw goes slack,
all its bristling projections seem
to lose their thrust, blood fills
its mouth, it lies still at last. Then,
assured that the fish is
dead, will not take the hook again,
he throws it overboard, where it floats.
I see the spiky feelers, the spines
sharp as needles fanning through its fins,
and know he’s killed it for being ugly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native New Englander, Iris Miller has lived most of her adult life in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Summers find her on Monhegan Island in Maine, where she writes in a community of poets. She has explored imagery as art teacher to city children, visual artist, clinical art therapist, practitioner of shamanic healing, and in recent years, through poetry. As Patricia Ann Lothrop she grew up in Reading, Massachusetts, and received degrees from Middlebury College and Cornell University. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and in a chapbook, Angels Flying Backwards.
THE ORCHARDS OF CLEVELAND
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