When I was a kid, my parents

had this great, big fish tank in the corner of 

their kitchen. I remember 

that at night, it lit the thin linoleum tiles with a pale-blue 

fluorescence. Blue like light from a 

winter sun, beaming through the shallow hull of a blue-snow

snow-fort, made big enough for 

only you.

Blue like opening your eyes underwater and 

looking up towards the sun past 

the surface.

Blue like Max’s waterbed in A Goofy Movie.

 

The tank was just my height–

perfect for learning and observing names of 

fish I recited back to a father whose face, in a memory,

I can no longer see. Sucker

fish, angel fish– black silk ribbon fins, like a black 

North and South star, above and below the angular contours of her 

striped, angelic body. 

I studied her and I called her by name.  

 

It was one day after school I had come home to find her 

dead in the grass.

 

My mother had been angry with my father and punched 

the fishtank, which had busted and gushed its 

great, big pale-blue 

all over the linoleum tiles. 

 

She swept up the glass, soaked up the water, and 

threw the fish in the yard to die.

Threw the fish, their 

mocking mouths, wide and upturned like

big-toothed grins–

threw them in the yard to suffer slow.

 

This, I never saw, but knew well enough 

her troubled heart. Knew 

well enough her eyes turned black– and theirs, 

looked up toward me past blades of green

St. Augustine and my navy blue Mary Janes. 

Looked at me with eyes wide and pleading, dry and

cemented in the moment they lost hope—

and they told me 

they never wanted to be 

 any happier than she was. They never meant to be 

any happier.