Junk fish, made of garbage and black silt,
mud given breath, if it were ever so,
I lay on my stomach beside the stream
and watched them glide in the current, then go

bounding like grasshoppers when the light changed
casting lacy shadows on the bottom.
Fish common as dirt, big-lipped and hungry,
mouths made, like vacuum cleaners, to suck scum

from rocks and scour the sand clean. Sometimes
they’d roll their flanks up and their tiny scales
would catch the sun, throwing off a yellow
light, a dirty, magnified gold through curls

of water spreading easily across
the surface of a brook. We’ call them
Golden Shiners then and though this dim flash
a signal, though for god knows what. They’d swim

in nervous, glittering schools, like red fins
folding an unfolding, translucent tail
sweeping one way, then the other, holding
them afloat. We’d use them for bait, impale

them underneath the dorsal fin, or stick
the hook from lip to lip locking their jaws
shut, free enough to wiggle there like sin
in the blue depths of a lake. And because

we were children, we thought nothing of death.
Certainly not these, plentiful and cheap.
We caught them by the hundreds in our traps
and always there were more, as if the deep

water bred them like grass or drops of rain,
not really singular, not selves like us,
but things to cast into the dark, soulless
and expendable. An without remorse

the big fish, northern pike or bass, would seize
them in a frenzy of greed, gluttony
that thrilled us, surged up our arms into hearts
that beat like pistons, mad with sympathy.

And all the time, beneath us in the weeds,
the mud gave up another host of dace,
black splinters of oblivion, without
regard, without an essence or a face.