I want
to call it boredom,
and the kind of grief
bred in alleys lost to summer dust
that made us think to lime the
stream
made sense somehow,
as if to pour in powdered rock until
the slow brown boiled with foam
would prove…, would loose
the tight air pooled like acid in our ribs.
Dead already, our fathers said,
the water stung with the drainage from the mine
so the algae had long ago choked
and those few from town bold
or dull enough to swim
afterwards would claw their scaling skin for days.
And so when Doug,
the large-jawed boy we feared and loved
for how his bruised arms darkened in the sun,
split the bag we’d stolen
from the quarry,
stone dust sugaring the water surface,
an effervescent hiss
staining the warm noon air,
we couldn’t press around him fast enough
for what came next.
A brown trout large as my forearm
flipped thickly to the bank,
all muscled spine thrashing in saw grass.
Honeyed slime dripped from its
skin.
Damp white powder caked on its pupil,
eating in, eating in
until its eye globe burst, sunk
into itself on the weed-thick bank
we left behind us, in the haze of years to rot.
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