Inside my catfish body you will find
two additional fish—blue & washed
in wet light through the translucent
mesh of my skin scale-netted. This trinity
in me writes the most crucial poems:
a catfish, a large-mouth, a perch.
Are they three dreams inside a dream
—merely fantastical? No. They’re
experiential—belief wrapped
in muscle: metaphysical flesh I answer to
the way others do God. That’s right:
a perch inside a large-mouth inside
a catfish. (Belief gets confusing.) There is
the blue river in me & the black, wider
one I can’t explain. In the night
sky it hums like an AC unit set to 58
now. I used to pray directly to it
on my lawn—eyes shut tight
by the vice of my sin & failure
after Baptist meetings. It had
too much to say, & I couldn’t
listen—if not from fear then
for the freedom of the blue future
I entered I had to leave it
in the stars above me where
I knew it belonged—far from me,
darkening—& continue walking.
J. SCOTT BROWNLEE is a poet from Llano, Texas. His work appears widely and includes the chapbook Highway or Belief, which won the 2013 Button Poetry Prize. He is a founding member of The Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class, both in the United States and abroad. A former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU, he currently lives in Brooklyn.
