Suddenly shit fuck surprise
Slackjawed mouth teenage scales
Gill agape in terror alerts
Bulging eyes that feel air first
Chickenskin talons you crush bone
Blind unencumbered pain
Snatching swoop from bubble muffle
Ecstatic O M G
Home home home home home home home
Beyond beyond beyond
Pain confusion hot and cold
No no no no breath realm
Talon through the heart yum pink
Swoop, dirty wings, new blue
Silver rip, crimson once blue
New blue so hot it’s cold
See! New sun realm darkness bright
New blue screaming wind light
Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead
Breathing windless no breath
Breathless no breath breathless breath
Black black black screech! No breath
- This poem was published by Undecimals Almanac, 2020
- Copyright © 2020 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.
- An introduction to this poem for Undecimals go: I saw a salmon fall from the sky. Its body had been dropped mid-air by a bald eagle killer—no one knows why. She’s a talented hunter, but a clumsy one, I guess. Surely when your priorities are food, sex, and sleep, you seek to hold onto food, sex and sleep whenever you can. The life of a Pacific Salmon is one of struggle and shock marked by periodic entry into drastically different realms. Adolescence is the exception, the passage of which is spent in the middle of the ocean and remains largely mysterious to humans. No one really knows what they do out there, away from the streams fisherman and bears frequent; one can only assume it’s erotic. What better way to await the next passage of one’s life than with an orgy in open waters. I imagine salmon know about patience. Vast, crushingly loud solitude. They await the voice of the sun or the warmth of water to tell them to go home and die. It was the look on the salmon’s face, distrustfully caught in my memory by a momentary pause in gravitational inevitability, that remains lodged. Stupefied and searching for sense, the salmon appeared to me as totally alive as it fell through the air. But then so do the humans who die in surprise. I tried to imagine the salmon’s surprise. Surprised by what one might imagine as the blowing heat or rushing cold of oxygen, by the sense that air, this terrifying new atmosphere, pummels instead of flows. Suddenly oxygen. Suddenly gravity. Suddenly shit fuck, surprise! The salmon was not waiting to die, but was snatched from life like a Pompeiian citizen.