Selected for publication by Stephanie Anderson
My Father Cooks My Mother Breakfast
My father slits the skin
and like a mouth the trout opens.
Its language returns to him, the way
gills punctuate the other cuts he will make.
Morning comes late, and night still watches
with its wide, flat eye
while he pulls the head and guts
out of their silver house. I don’t understand
what it is I see, water running
wordless through the body, the flesh
coming free from its scaffolding of bone, the iron
pan glazing with heat, my mother
waiting in her robe as he works the knife
again in silence, until the fish
is no longer a fish
but piece after piece, pink, slick
and cold like his hands
searching to seize a stone
at the bottom of the creek. Who are these strange people
who say nothing? They cast shadows
like the trees cast shadows
on the lake in twilight, and I feel uncertain
of the shape they will take
when they no longer wade
through the dark. When they eat
it is as though they are not there
in the kitchen where I was raised; they are somewhere
my father used to go, and still knows.
Anne Menasché grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley, and she is now based in Upstate New York, after spending several years working in Washington, D.C. Her poetry has appeared in publications including ballast, Bicoastal Review, Frontier Poetry, River Heron Review and storySouth.
Guest Judge: Stephanie Anderson is the author of the award-winning One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture as well as From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press). Her essays and short stories have appeared in outlets such as The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Ninth Letter, The Chronicle Review, and many others. She lives in South Florida, where she serves as assistant professor of creative nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University.
