Skinning Catfish

Skinning Catfish



Catfish lay in the stained white basin,
a mass of writhing life,
each struggling to die the slowest.
My father grabbed one,
hung it from a dull hook dangling over the basin
and whittled it down to meat in seconds.
Starting with the gray cap of skin on their heads,
then fins placed where ears should be;
all the time talking about the Dow-Jones Crop Report,
the bastards in Washington, the lack of rain,
while the customers watched, mostly women mostly black
mostly poorer than us, somewhere in between Roman
spectacle and grocer.


He could say anything, tell stories;
say they taught a monkey how to talk up
at the College, but all it wanted to talk about
was the price of bananas.
Say, they been looking at the Old Testament,
and they found evidence of early people’s
use of technology, for example, it says in Genesis
how God took a rib from Adam, and made it
into a loud speaker.
Some of them laugh, some smile politely;
they weren’t there to listen to him dance
through lies so much as watch his knife dance
through flesh, though gossip is always an added bonus.



CL Bledsoe

Posted over on Spillway Review