Trompe L'oeil

It’s a fish because I tell you it's a fish.
It’s a fish because I say the word
& it swims there. Men fling their poles
at it from the shore, casting their lines
in perfect parabolas, tempting the word
toward the fragment of worm
tied to the end of the hook.
It’s not a knife because I say the words
it’s not a knife, & the knife disappears.
If it were a knife, there’d be little spatters
of blood on the porcelain, the scent
of sulfur leaking from my pores, words like sorry
& regret scratched out on parchment paper.
But there’s nothing sharp here, just this fish,
a fish that’s more like a car than a word
for how quickly it drives the mind to the places
it already knows it knows, places where the tops
of evergreen trees rupture the skyline,
where the men, having no knife, tear into
the thumping word through the gills,
finding flakes of cherry blossom
where blood should be, making
easy work of the white meat that, eaten raw,
melts as soon as it hits the tongue.
But the mind can only stay gone for so long.
Soon, it makes its triumphant return,
crashing into a stanchion of shrubs,
clobbering up the front steps with its wet-shoes,
its footwork, its motor-mouth, its chin music,
leaving the door slightly ajar, lurching
forward at a great height, a head with no face
that rips the tilapia from my hands & fills
the empty space with a knife, freshly sharp,
a node of quartz glued to the handle.
The mind stuffs a sack with the cherry blossoms
that speckle the floor, the blossoms
clinging to the lampshade, the blossoms
swimming in the toilet water, the blossoms
sporadic & soggy in the sink. As it turns to leave,
waving goodbye for the night, endless petals
billow from the brim of its bag & dirty the room.
So much wood to mop & buff until it shines.
So many cherry blossoms in my veins, I must be a cherry.

ξ

Matthew Tuckner received his MFA in Creative Writing at NYU and will be a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at University of Utah beginning in the fall. He was the winner of the 2022 Yellowwood Poetry Prize, selected by Paige Lewis, and was a finalist for the 2023 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, and Poetry Daily, among others.