With Salmon, Bleeding


A Response to PETA
Holly Hughes

I no longer fish, but did, can still
feel salmon's muscled firmness,
sleek, cold arc through the yellow
rubber of my gloves as I loose
them from the net, lay them on deck—
wanting to slip them back
to the salty mouth of sea—
and did, a time or two,
when no one saw.

They feel pain, you say, as if that is
news to the people who catch them,
as if they didn't leap straight into
our hearts, emissaries from the deep,
bearers of light from that immense world
we won't enter until our last run.

Haven't we wished to swim unfettered—
without thought—where the light
filters down in gauzy curtains,
all the rooms of the mansion opening?
Haven't we wanted to ride an ocean
current home? This, then, the price
we pay for consciousness, for Adam
taking that first unthinking bite.

And the tradeoff we make for taking
their bodies, their pain and ours,
whenever we set out to catch
what we lost in the vastness,
dreaming an ocean big enough
for all of us to swim in.

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.