With Salmon, Bleeding


Ablution
Holly Hughes

From the trolling cockpit
I watch you rise
like a prayer to the surface,
pull you from the sea,
slide the hook from your jaw,
your silver body in my hands
gasping in the shock of air.
I lay the bowing arc of you
on the plywood table
to be cleaned.

The cannery says I must bleed
you while you're still alive.
I slice an artery,
your blood pools
thick and red on deck,
slit your long white belly,
pull out your luminous organs
heavy with herring,
stroke your scales—
ask forgiveness—
sluice your belly with sea water
until your bones glisten
white and startled
against pink flesh and
the water runs red
but your body knows
still what to do,
how to move
in the bright water.

Down I lay you on the wet deck,
empty and shining,
and the wing of your tail
strokes the wood
as you swim away
into air,
a silver river
of memory
longing
for the sea.

Holly Hughes has spent the last twenty-five summers working on boats in Alaska in a variety of capacities—deckhand/cook on a salmon's gillnetter, skipper of a sixty-five-foot schooner, and most recently as a naturalist. She spends her winters in Washington, where she teaches writing classes at Edmonds Community College. Her essay “Going Ashore” appeared in the Vernal 2006 issue of Sea Stories. "Ablution" has appeared previously in the Washington English Journal and The Hedgebrook Journal.