fish analogy

Madeleine Dale

i want to smack myself against a rock like a fish
scene in which i am fisherman and rock and yes
fish i want everything soft dead want to be calcinate
and unfeeling want the net to never have touched me
please put me back in the water please return me
to the place of cold scales and cold steels where 
the only game is how to eat without getting hooked
where we have wet fans instead of hands and twin
chambered hearts that do their own job well and don’t 
know how to love anything other than current or line
please send me back to fish-knowing to fish-wife to
flick-knife and thick seaweed let my own name be 
a kind of aloneness let me never be called by it 
out of the water and across the harbour let me never
want legs let me never go into the city in a dress 
give me no desires god give me no capillaries give me
a quick death or a long swim let me go back to being
a cold creature or the woman who cuts out its bones 
and let that be the end of it

Madeleine Dale is a poet and researcher from Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia. Her first full-length collection, Portraits of Drowning, won the 2023 Thomas Shapcott Prize, the Five Islands Poetry Prize, and was commended for the Wesley Michel Wright Prize. She was a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.