Gutting a Salmon
It barely moves when my uncle hooks it on the scale, mirror skin
bouncing back light such that rainbow waves dance in the air;
I see my reflection, too. The only other presence: mink skittering
across shore stones searching for scraps. The scraper reams
the salmon’s side; a flurry of skin shards, erupting, twinkling,
refracting the evening, make of themselves a momentary chandelier
decorating the dock as if it were a grand ballroom. His knife runs
through the gut mindlessly, rehearsed, like the same conversations
over the same games of euchre with the same outcomes for years.
Organs spill and splatter on the ground; the spiny leather hulls
of buckeyes thud dull falling onto dead grass. Our shadows
are larger than bodies. I want to be opened too, pierced, unraveled.
To let my liver plummet to the ground. To pick it up, sink my teeth in,
feel bile and blood drip down my cheeks like the nectar of a ripe peach.
I wonder, would it taste like butter and dill and lemon? Mold-riddled iron
and copper? Would it wriggle in my mouth and beat against my throat?
Tyler Reilly is a poet and birder from Ohio. His poetry can be found in North Dakota Quarterly, Space City Underground, and Short Vine Journal. He currently lives in Illinois, where he is an MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.