Jenny Doughty

Fish

I love their luscious liquidity,

their dappled metallic flamboyance:

sleek silver surface-spinning sardine schools,

trout hiding rainbows under riverbanks,

abyssal fish with gargantuan eyes

and primeval phosphorescent strangeness.

They are aliens among us. We're doomed

to know each other only through glass.

They are powerless in our world.

As a child I rode in a glass-bottomed boat

over the Red Sea's coral reefs and saw

swimming among orange coral branches

bright clownfish, groupers, parrotfish and damsels

and later dreamed I dived in with them,

miraculously had no need to breathe

but moved in all dimensions, as if

I were of fishy form and mind myself,

became part of that oceanic vastness,

feeling their freedom and flexibility,

capacity to see things from all sides,

imagined a heaven without limits, no land.

Jenny Doughty is originally British but has lived in Maine since 2002. Her first book Sending Bette Davis to the Plumber was published in 2017 by Moonpie Press and her second, As for the Rose, will be published in spring 2026 by Main Street Rag. Instagram. www.jennydoughty.com