A Fly Buzzed at the Feast on the Third Anniversary of Your Death
For my grandmother
I feel you most here
at a Chinese restaurant, flies
circling our table: roasted
pork belly, steamed dumplings,
a whole striped bass
with great clouded eyes
staring through me
as if I were glass, a flute
of champagne they serve
as the fish, fins still
intact, gills gutted,
writhes on the cutting board
just feet from us minutes
before it was cooked
and we laughed
about the time I rescued a turtle
from the tank of turtles
soon to be made into soup,
I thought I loved it,
needed to be the hero and it was you
who let me take him home
and bought a tank we kept
in our kitchen, unlike this
kitchen, windows fogged
with grease, dim light
reflecting off unmopped linoleum
and I ask myself from which body
of water our dinner was hooked,
what the fish must have felt
to be stripped of life:
from your nose they pulled
the thin plastic tube, its rivers
of air that kept your drowning
(cont’d “A Fly Buzzed…”, stanza break)
lungs alive only long enough
to say goodbye
that September day
that year nothing felt right
not even talking to you
through the nursing home window,
the skeletal remains of
a woman who jumped for joy
at any of life’s blunders
now withered,
picked apart;
I want to know
how to grieve like the river
as if any living body could
rush beyond what it has lost..
CHRISTIAN PAULISICH received his B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and is a Master’s candidate at Towson University. He lives in Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He was recently chosen as an honorable mention for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry and a finalist for Frontier Poetry's 2024 Nature & Place Contest, and received a Summer 2024 fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. His work has been published in Literary Matters, Denver Quarterly, the Atlanta Review, New American Writing, and others.