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| Dead Whale, Montana de Oro |
He held up a bait fish, the size of smelt,
showing how to hook it behind the skull
so that it would keep swimming until something
gobbled it down. "They don’t feel nothin’,"
he insisted. I grabbed one from the bait pool,
struggling to stick the hook in, the fish jerking
this way and that in my hand and releasing
a faint, shrill scream as the barb entered
Go on a different journey.
its brain. As I tossed my line into the sea,
the deckhand announced that he'd figured
that two on this trip wouldn’t last, laughing
how he was wrong about one, the other curled up
half-alive in the cabin on a cot under a blanket.
“You know what? Never been wrong before,”
he smirked as he squinted at me, my Dad
ignoring him. Suddenly a greenhorn reeled
in a shark, and the deckhand shot it twice
in the head, but it kept flopping around,
so he heaved it over the side. One who kept
drinking beer and barfing over the railing
Go on a different journey.
hooked a seagull, and the deckhand snorted
as it hovered behind the ship like a kite. I
noticed a scar on the deckhand's forehead.
“See this? I leaned over to pat a little girl
on the head, and she pulled out a gun
and shot me, but I’m as hard-headed
as a shark. When I woke up, I asked
what’d happened to her, and my friend
told me that they killed her. Why did they
do that? She was only four years old!
She was a killer, he said. She’d do the same
to the next soldier. But you know what
Take a different path.
was worse? A woman rushed up to me
and spit on me in the airport after
I made it home. They say the war’s
almost over, but I say it’ll be over the day
fish stop feasting on each other."
He pulled open a burlap bag, where
a lingcod was swallowing a red snapper.
Then he coughed and howled with laughter.
