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1.
Mom 
kept the  perch 
we caught in a bucket.

And when we took them home
She would clean and place them
In our twenty gallon tank
Where they bobbed in stunned silence
Eyes watching for any white movement.

Nobody cared
when they committed fishicide 
on their domesticated tank-mates.

Even the little beta fish
Who had survived our six day pilgrimage from Florida, to find Mecca
was a cool whip container.

2.
Whenever we had guests for dinner,

Mom swooned they
were the smartest fish she had ever seen.

She bestowed upon them names - Jed and Lucy
tapping at the glass 
with one extended finger,
feeding them fish flakes,
like  porpoises fed from the teeth of a trainer in Ocean World

“You can’t keep perch in a fish tank”
the guests would say,
but
they lived for two years
bobbing and staring
in the vacant tank space.

 3.
One crisp winter morning
Jed finished his breakfast of gold fish flakes,  took one
last gulp of slimy tank
water 
then hurled
himself off of glass
walls.
It went 
over and over, 
so hard
I almost thought
the glass would crack.

4.
Lucy 
sat quietly and watched 
him.

She too died a few days later
like aged soulmates
who often cease
to be after their amor
dies.

When someone left the lid open, 
she plunged
her blue green skin shimmered
as she laid 
making fish O’s in the dry air..

I often wonder
if the air that morning
smelled
like an ice floe
to a better place
somewhere Jed waited
with our beta and our angel fish
a place of worms, kelp 
and dragonflies.

4.
Mom 
emptied the tank of the murky filtered water.

Rinsed the ultra neon yellow fish gravel,
and placed the fake plants on a sponge.
Separating  air filter, from pump 
from clear plastic tubing
and put to rest
in a brown cardboard box..

She did it without a word.

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