Author’s Note: “Tropical Fish” is a relic from my childhood and mostly true. I had an aquarium in my bedroom, and my dad and I spent a lot of time staring at those fish.
—MA
CW: None.
They came to our house in plastic bags,
guppies, mollies, swordtails,
a fat spiny catfish, a neon tetra,
their lidless eyes peering wildly
through the transparent sacks
Like impatient fingers they poked
the plastic or swam up and down, shaking
their heads in primitive confusion.
At feeding time they crowded the surface,
rhythmically flapping their toothless jaws.
My favorite was a platy. I called him
Old Gold. His brilliant scales outshone
all the other fish, but on some days you
could see right through him and stare
at his entrails, as white as death. In the end
a fungal infection rotted his skin
and he sank to the gravel, his fins
pitted with hungry black specks.
Deep in the night my father would enter
my darkened bedroom and turn on the light
bulb above the tank, sometimes sitting
for half an hour in his underwear, breathing
softly on the aquarium’s glass.
I think he was watching the fish sleep.
They hung torpid, their fins almost still,
inert for long minutes until the light
gradually woke them. One morning
over breakfast he quietly told me
that he’d imagined a fish’s dream: falling
falling, deeper and colder,
then choking on the ice water in your gills.
