Fish Lit
by Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen
part i
You don’t even have to go outside.
The bank of a river, a creek in Montana;
I started hearing him everywhere.
Not completely out of thin air,
the old drunk told me about trout fishing
before he eventually killed himself.
Everything long and white, I behold Pittsburg for the first time—
bend a pin. Something about its motion was wrong,
changed a flight of stairs into a creek.
I remember mistaking an old woman
for a trout stream.
There’s always a festival and a photograph
of a pretty girl in a bathing suit—
huge-moving, child-eyes when the hammer clicked back.
It was kind of a friendly look.
part ii
Ten miles after Ketchum, where the good fishing was,
Deanna Durbin, the woman who travels with me,
put a blue rock in the pocket of Trout Fishing in America.
She needed money for something, and the Missouri was frozen over.
I had a childhood fancy—Hemingway and a dozen colored rocks.
The woman cooked all night, her menstrual cramps stone cold.
This went on for months, the menstrual cramps. Forgive me.
part iii
The higher the expectation for catching fish
—they are there.
Everyone has a secret spot, rituals, sacrifices.
The fly simply always produces the confidence in the secret,
and what is secret is sacred.
We hush up all that has to do with faith.
Belief conjures new strings of religion,
turns fishing into something I just can’t get behind.
Testimony orders the chaos,
like farting and tap dancing at the same time will produce a
fish.
He’s never wrong and I’m
an agnostic angler.
My back is sore from casting.
part iv
It’s a rare sensation,
where I want to end up all along.
___________________________________________________________________________
Prayer of Youth
Spoken like a god, I think I am young,
unsure why I am suddenly on two feet
—it’s probably my fault.
My girlfriend signed me up for this.
I have the emotional asshole of a kid trying not to stink,
a folding chair taking up space,
cupholders that can’t hold cups.
I wake up, in mourning,
missing the sacrament,
and fetal cells born on Easter Sunday.
There’s no one to note time of arrival,
to signal a long week repenting.
I don’t even feel bad.
It only takes one drop of gray to ruin absolutes.
I can run from the cops, from the popular
possession of a penis.
When the wind stops blowing,
my nips are hard companions,
poised like fat pipe
bombs
—social misfits,
not in the same league as you.
I promise you lightyears sputtering into flames.
A thousand milliseconds that see us,
not as soul mates, as much a matter of completion,
the fleshy pink tongue
floating in the core of forever.
You weren’t the only thing making me happy.
My young self wore a black miniskirt to my baptism,
immersed in younger youth, but the city pond is empty.
I’m waking up vertical today, because you can’t
go long sleeping without commitment.
These sweaty palms won’t give in
to the scissors in the underwear drawer.
On my tongue bread and water,
sacrament, oral diarrhea.
I keep my damn mouth shut.
The only commitment I’m good at is to
Love and love more. Poems
will have to wait.
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