In the photograph, wildflowers everywhere,
I am seven years old. In Northern Michigan,
sand shifts with my father’s mood.
We are standing in the lake,
water shimmering around our ankles.
Minnows in their nervous schools dart,
always toward each other, breathing in
what other species breathe out
below the surface. That summer, I believed
all fish blind, guided through the world
by their instincts, feeling their way home
through dark waters. I don’t know where
this idea came from or why I believed it.
I believed too, in my father. How he towered
over everything. In the photograph
he wears a beige bucket hat, fishing lures
fastened to its brim. He smiles widely
as though he’s told the cleverest joke.
I smile too because he is pleased with me,
and he is so rarely pleased with anything.
In a year, he will leave us. Signs
are everywhere–minnows darting blindly,
bait dangling on the line, the sun
radiant as pain. Me squinting up at him.
How the world can look so bright
just before it bursts into flame.
JOAN KWON GLASS is the author of Night Swim, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022) and two chapbooks, How to Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) and If Rust Can Grow on the Moon (Milk & Cake Press, 2022). She serves as poet laureate for Milford, CT, Editor in Chief for Harbor Review and as a writing instructor for Brooklyn Poets, Corporeal, and Hudson Valley Writers Center. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, Rattle, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the University of Akron Poetry Prize, the Subnivean Award, the Lumiere Review Award and the Sundress Academy Broadside Contest. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Sundress Best of the Net.
HOWIE GOOD’s handmade collages have appeared or are forthcoming in Blue as Orange, Scapegoat, and other online publications, including MAYDAY. The collages are intended as a rebuke to the lifeless perfection of photoshopped images as well as to provoke an authentic response by combining images in a way that challenges old habits of seeing. Howie Good’s newest book is Frowny Face, a collection of prose poems and collages from Redhawk Publications. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.