Tag: fish

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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Bad News Comes in Threes

I found out my spine keeps narrowing into a funnel,
pinching my spinal cord, like pressing two fingers together,
cutting off blood circulation. I require surgery.
Can I handle surgery at my age? My spine pretzels
into a question mark like a contortionist,
asking questions only a surgeon can answer:

whatever happened to that boy
who climbed up the spine of a tree, into the whirlpool of light
and maple leaves? Or that boy swinging on a rope
over a curved river, letting go, ker-splashing,
surgically slicing open water, as it zipped up over me,

only to discover, much to my chagrin, the hard, recklessness
of boyhood that I could swim for the life of me.
I couldn’t float, and sank to rock bottom, Perhaps, I died,
fished out, spewing water out of my lungs.
Boys are notoriously born without sense of risk or caution.

I never noticed the wear and tear on my body, too manly
to admit defeat, to know when beaten into submission,
but when my primary doctor noticed my hands tremoring
like wind-tossed leaves, she sent me to a specialist.

Now, I have three diagnosis I never had before, each one
cascading worse than the first, like a river over rapids,
like the one I plunged into without thinking about my actions
or reactions. I believe all boys are born with jarred brains.

My nerves have bad and mixed messages, telling me
I am not worthy of this body. My muscles twitch and buckle,
and earthquake with epilepsy. I feel like drowning in currents
of electrical displacement, body jumbling and thrashing.

I recall, once, watching as a car was unable to stop,
smacked a dog, snapping its spine. I could hear the sudden,
sickening thump-whack, a sound lasting weeks afterwards,
the body, crying and promising to taking it to a vet.
As far as I knew, the dog had no owner, no one to return it to,
no known address. From there, the road never went straight.

I’m half-listening to my doctor about the second worse news, ever,
and I’m still wondering about that nameless dog.

*

Kingfisher

A kingfisher’s eyes peers deep
into the mystery of water and the illusion
for a fish’s actual location,
knowing patience rewards those that seek inward.

How quiet its strike, and the more intense quiet afterward.
Patience begins with mindfulness,
intense concentration, and seeing beyond this world.

The blue gill doesn’t stand a chance.
Nature contains both violence and calm.

When the bird’s beak thrusts into the aquamarine water,
its spear finds center mass.
Its beak’s spear shows no mercy,
the water does not shiver with grief.

This disturbance ends abruptly, and quickness crests.
Even my attention focused through binoculars
gets startled by swiftness and resolve.

Water covers up the evidence of death.

My intake and released breath make the kingfisher’s glance,
daring me to judge it
or its need and purpose.

The kingfisher goes back to work, studying for movement.

This world maintains its strange balancing act.

As a medic, I had to gauge who to rescue during war.
I had to decide who wouldn’t make it.
Am I any better than nature?
Is it always about trading one life for another?
Is it about solitude getting re-distributed elsewhere?

This world can include risk or survival.

Everywhere has an element of the quickening,
when moments happen too fast and we’re forced to decide.

*

Why Fishing Lures Are Alluring

I found a tackle box at a garage sale,
and my first thought was to go fishing,
even though I lived miles from water.
The water I knew was a swollen creak
that ran faster than deer from a hunter.
The water ran like it was in panic.
It looked as massive as the Mississippi River.

I never wanted to fish until I saw the box,
opening it like a pirate’s treasure chest,
finding lures flashing back light and colors.
I never considered their hooks dangerous.
All I needed included a fish pole, fishing wire,
a can of worms, an empty bucket to fill with fish.

The box cost a dollar, and I had one
burning a hole in my pocket.

I begged my dad to take me to the lake.
Dad, it’d be fun, we can go fishing together.
When he refused, I deflated like a balloon,
however, no one could stop my stupidly.
I peddled all the way to the state park,
and saw the toll collector, chose a deer trail,
sneaked in. I was bound and determined.

I blanched and almost passed out
trying to hook a worm. I thought I heard
it screaming in pain. It turns out the lake
had no fish when it’s out of season,
and water was about to freeze over. It turns out
I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is editor for Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022; He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize. His 24 full-length collections include Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Selected Poems” (FutureCycle Press, 2024). He won the 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize for “One Thousand Origami Paper Cranes Fly Away in Search of Peace”. Forthcoming is “Sounds I Cannot Hear Clearly Anymore Add Up to the Sum of Silence” (Bainbridge Island Press, 2026).

Two Poems by John Grey

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GOODBYE AND HELLO

This is a town
where the train doesn’t stop.
Arrival and departure
are one and the same thing.

But there is more to the people
in this place than a smear
in the window of a passing locomotive.
Let no one rush through and call it nothing.

For years we’ve worked and slept
inside this soft-edged blur,
the scattering of houses,
the two-block Main Street.

Yet the train barrels through
at fifty miles an hour
worth of indifference.
It cares only for the bodies on board,

never the ones who stay put,
who plant themselves,
who insist on mattering.
We apologize for not being scenery.

We are used to not being seen.

*

THE FISHERMEN’S WIVES

Wives stood on these blunt headlands
the way women stand at stoves, at cribs.
But they cooked no meals here.
They tended to no babies.
Their eyes scoured the fog
for the outline of a boat returning.

They suffered the gray hours,
faces pressed to air
as if it were a windowpane,
that looked out on the unknown.

But in a tidy downtown park,
a fisherman stands in marble,
thirty feet tall, net at his feet,
a monument to the ones
the sea swallowed whole.

No stone remembers the ones on shore,
those who died by living,
of intermingled dread and hope,
of the slow rot
of days and nights alone.
There is no plaque
for the labor of waiting.

But maybe they are their own memorial –
steadfast on their bluffs,
the salt wind blustering hair,
formed of the steadfast ache of love
that stared deep into the pit of nothingness,
and would not turn away.

*

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Shift, Trampoline and Flights. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Levitate, White Wall Review and Willow Review.

Two Poems by CL Bledsoe

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I Wish You Were Fun

I don’t know what the birds are singing
about, but I suspect it’s something to do
with their sciatica. Mirrors begrudge us
for not being Picassos. All sadness and past
due bills while needing a haircut. I wish
I was fun. I wish fear didn’t strangle my smile
while I am just trying to get the shopping
done. There’s so much weight on my
shoulders I can’t look up without something
important sliding off. Laugh. At least
I’m not Ayn Rand. It’s a different kind
of fear. That I can’t open enough
to the world or that I can’t close fast
enough. Either way, no one is happy
with every new recipe. When I close
my eyes and think of you I see commercials.
So many times it’s about flirting with the void
when all you want is to be held by the darkness.
I’m sorry that you aren’t happy, but I’m not
going to be your midlife crisis. The difference
between an adventure and a mistake is all
in the telling. These days, I’m all mistake.
Coward cowering indoors for fear of storm.
I’m already wet and I have so far to go in
these squeaky shoes. But you remember
when I was fun. Were there ever days
before these?

*

Mornings, Feeding the Fish

There was a different smell in the morning.
The cows were quiet. The breeze

came in from the Lake down the hill.
The sun hadn’t heated the dead

fish, yet. You could believe the world
was new, just because it hadn’t

seen light in a while.

*

Raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas, CL Bledsoe is the author of more than twenty books, including the poetry collections Riceland, Trashcans in Love, Grief Bacon, and his newest, Driving Around, Looking in Other People’s Windows, as well as his latest novels Goodbye, Mr. Lonely and the forthcoming The Saviors. Bledsoe co-writes the humor blog How to Even, with Michael Gushue located here: https://medium.com/@howtoeven. His own blog, Not Another TV Dad, is located here: https://medium.com/@clbledsoe. He’s been published in hundreds of journals, newspapers, and websites that you’ve probably never heard of. Bledsoe lives in northern Virginia with his daughter.