THE CARE AND FEEDING OF BETTA FISH
In those pin-drop days after divorce, my mother
would not enter the kitchen. Yolk yellow and wild,
it became jungle in its yokeless state
as the bay windows let in the dark, the granite countertops glinting
stars in airless heavens. And on those counters,
sat a fish tank.
In those eggshell days when my mother would not
leave her room, my sister became groundskeeper
to that fishbowl, that plastic
jewel, scraping scum, diligently dropping
flakes to the betta.
And in one of those Pleistocene days when my mother
would not enter the kitchen, the fish died.
My sister, padding into the kitchen on a March morning
that could only be called representative, discovered
death for the first time, finding the fish
floating like a cartoon of a fish, like an
apple-core, gnawed and discarded, bobbing
with a stillness that some would call profound.
With what must have been reverence for the new and deeper
silence mushrooming within our then representative silence,
she did not cry.
She just fed the fish.
Each day, she let fish food fall into the bowl,
like some might leave lilies at a grave.
Preferring not to exhume the dead,
she did not clean the tank.
As those interbellum days passed, the fish tank
grew greener, algae erupting, the fish rotting.
As in those days my mother would not enter the kitchen,
the moss-grown grave was saved, undisturbed
but for the customary offering
of fish food.
But the rotting fish smelled like
rotting fish, and with seven-year-old ingenuity,
wanting to save the fish, my sister tucked it in
the back of the oven.
The emerald had only sat for one week when
my mother entered the kitchen,
and thinking of Sylvia Plath,
opened the oven
and screamed.
—from Rattle #86, Winter 2024
__________
Moss Lelko: “The more distant my memory, the more extraneous details are filtered away until what remains are washes of color and sensation. This poem sprung from a childhood memory of a breakfast where my mother gave me solemn instructions for how I should organize her funeral. Even more than the words, the most crystalline details are the smear of sunnyside yolks on my plate and the color of algae in our fishbowl, which I could see from the table.”
