Fish-woman: The Daughter of a Fisherman's Son

Courtney DuChene

My father searched for fish

when the water flooded out of my mother’s vagina

to make way for my squealing breaths.

I came into the world thrashing like the

fish on my grandfather’s butchering block.

my limbs were walleye, perch, and sunfish

flailing for their lives as

the knife came down on their gills.

And my father, who watched their

Shrivelled, purple asphyxiation, he

dunked me in the bathtub.

He taught my lips to purse until

Bubbles formed and I could

Breeeeeeaaaaaath.

My childhood was a wave

breaking laughter white capped on shores

Squeals of father and daughter

We scoured the lake bed for

Clam shells which he split flushed

And bubblegum for the hook snared

Mouths of fish like me who couldn’t be

Contained to the bridled black pebbles of the water’s belly.

As I grew, he used the lips of

Conch shells to swallow my acumen--

Novels, fossils, musical scales

As I threatened to flood his dry world

Of ships shoved into bottles, never sailed.

I couldn’t remain captive with his tchotchkes.

Even when he built a rim of sandbags--

the helm of his Viking ship.

I swallowed them whole.

Left him shipwrecked

With the ruins of the Titanic, the Edmund Fitzgerald.

There are no survivors when the operas of

mermaids and sirens bloom with fall magnolias.