“It’s a very real reality that we do risk losing salmon in my lifetime.” —Cecilia Gobin
She floats side-up, talon-pierced, one eye on the sky,
one eye gone. There will be no more
emissaries from the sea to the mountain-tops.
This is a kindness, he said.
Sick salmon held in palms upturned to the sky.
Later: Knife behind the jaw on the kitchen counter.
She jumped and thrashed one last time and we startled
and shrieked as if we were the ones who were about to be harmed.
So much protest we had to take her outside.
We spilled her eggs a basket of currents onto the lawn
and then into the garbage.
Not nestled in the gravel and cobble where they belonged.
And just like that the last salmon on earth was sliced up
and put into small plastic ziplocks in the freezer.
Where she bled, froze, thawed, burned.
When we learned what we’d done we plead:
but we didn’t know.
We could not eat her now, knowing what we’d done.
Knowing how sick she’d been, not only parasitic and toxic
but that she’d been the last.
One day, that winter, we cleaned out the freezer
and found her behind plastic-wrapped pizzas
and berries from three summers ago.
We didn’t remember, we said.
Her flesh, a pink beauty like a late-October dahlia,
we placed to rest in the compost
bound for a forgotten rot.
—
Hannah Martin is a poet, former naturalist, and cold-water enthusiast living by the Salish Sea.
