All in by Emma Miao

by Emma Miao

He’s twirling three feet
ahead of the reporter’s yellowed boots,
searching for prey before migrating south.

Someone’s thrown rotten cheese into
the lake, leftover from pasta night, a fuzzy
cube half-buried under pebbles, visible

in the moonlit clear. The catfish eyes it, brushing
with its silver whiskers. A twitch later, it’s gone.
It has been a month since I could taste anything.

Catfish find aromas irresistible,
unlike me, eyes closed, struggling to remember
the taste of charred chicken. Catfish have a hundred

thousand taste buds within and around
their blue-black bodies, while I lay here, lemon
juice running down my chin, aching for a fizzle

on the tongue, to peel
back this numb, wet mouth,
the promise of zest dancing on the wind.

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Emma Miao is a Chinese-Canadian poet from Vancouver, BC. Her poems appear in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Emerson Review, Rising Phoenix Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. The winner of the F(r)iction Poetry Contest 2020 and a finalist for the Yemmasee Poetry Contest 2020, Emma is a Commended Foyle Young Poet 2019, a COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Fellow, and an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. Her spoken word + piano album, Oscillation, is forthcoming this winter. Tweet her @emmaamiao.