With
Salmon, Bleeding
Kenai
Rachel Moore
When you pitch fish
there is a little moment,
between when they raise and lower
the brailer bag, that you wait for.
This, is where I would lean.
Raingear slick with blood and scales,
my arms steaming against
the shell pink sky of the inlet.
Head tucked under the deck,
back curved with the inside of the hull,
leaving a trail of blood on the wood
like a lost fish.
Sitting on the hundreds of salmon,
bellies up and bruised.
Legs locked deep in the silver and pink.
Just listening
to the gurry drip down
in foamy pink slops onto my arms,
to the skipper’s distant radio,
the gulls fighting for fish heads.
Waiting for the groan of the rusted crane
to drop from the dock again.
Not moving,
except to wipe my flushed cheeks
in the crook of my arm
and close my eyes for just one moment.
Rachel Moore writes: "I went to Alaska the first time by answering
a get-rich-quick flyer I saw stapled to a telephone pole. I was eighteen
years old. I started out packing roe for a joint-venture processor in
Bristol Bay. Over the next six years I worked as a herring roe technician,
and deckhand on tenders and purse seines. 2004 was the first year I worked
in Alaska outside of the commercial fishing industry, on a U.S. Forest
Service fisheries crew doing salmonid surveys."
Rachel graduated with
a B.S. in Fisheries Biology from Humboldt State University in December
2005 and is presently working as a West Coast Groundfish Observer on
the Oregon coast. She has appeared at the annual Fisher Poets Gathering
in Astoria, Oregon, and “Kenai” was published in Salt in
Our Veins: Poems and Stories from the Astoria Fisher Poets Gathering.
Her ultimate goal is to do work that helps to preserve the fishing way
of life, social equity, and local stewardship for small fishing families.
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