Dion O’Reilly
Big Fish Eat Little Fish
after a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
I am the simple sieve that drinks the universe.
—Ruth Stone
Flying fish pause mid-flight, watch
the butchery like sad birds.
Men segment the fish gut,
disgorge her digestion—
smaller, bodies, same as hers, swallowed whole.
They in turn puke minnows and krill, tinier still.
Mindless, Un-maliced, all feeding, all food.
What else was there in her tidal whispers, moon shifts,
bioluminescence and blackness— but to open her great
unseen mouth, suck down what drifted in
on a thick rushing stream?
The men are armored. Industrious. Bringers
of hooks and tritons, ladders, boats, saws, cities, distant cranes.
Wild instruments of dissection. To slice up a deep-water
creature, find an endless hunger.
Do they recall—in their cold-blooded bodies—
the sweet eaters of salmon and blessed trout, who sprouted feet,
walked ashore, covered the earth and learned to be human?
Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.
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