Catfish
The catfish themselves are like dinosaurs. Catfish have skin like a lizard. A milky grey-brown. Smooth with muscle definition and whiskers that don’t look a thing like my cat’s. That don’t twitch and snarl from her couch cushion perch as she watches them, the catfish, too, wondering how the hell they got here but not interested enough to ask them.
They say horses see dinosaurs out of the corners of their eyes. That’s what my riding instructor told me when I was 8-years-old at that summer camp for poor rural kids. She said that horses are so old it’s embedded in their DNA, these visions of giant lizards, of featherless birds. That their minds and their eyes team up to play tricks on them to spook them into throwing their riders.
Maybe cats can see catfish. Maybe I’m a cat. My boyfriend says I smell like one.
These catfish, they swim right by all the Freud and the Nietzsche and The Little Engine That Could. They move past all that with their tails swishing currents of molecules, with their fore-fins not even rustling the pages. These catfish, they – all four of them – congregate around a notebook of poetry you wrote specifically for me when we was a word you and I were still a part of.
Catfish don’t have whiskers, they have “barbels.” That’s what the internet tells me. The internet tells me that there are three thousand and twenty-three different species of catfish and that some of them can live in saltwater.
The internet is man-made though. All the content of it is. So the internet could be as wrong as all the forevers in all the poems the catfish are crowding around. Could be as misinformed as riding instructors.
But maybe my living room is really saltwater. Maybe my books really all are coral. Living and breathing and sharp and cutting.
Chronology does not matter when picking through poems from old lovers, when trying to figure out what the catfish would like to hear. Lovers’ poetry is funny that way. When it’s in a notebook addressed to the lovee, it brings forth only a very specific period of time. It’s the blueprint of very specific sets of synapses.
It’s the words I’m sure you wrote after you gave me this notebook that would be much more interesting to hear for the fish. Much more heartfelt despite all the time playing martyrs. But the catfish don’t know that. The little brains inside their skulls – those boney skulls that make them catfish – they can’t comprehend that all these words have since soured and rotted and begged for the compost.
"Catfish" is available as a bonus
short story in Roast.
