Mom's Attempt At the Garden of Eden

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.