Slimehead (hoplastethus atlanticus)

Humans eat first with their ears so to sell this deep sea fish we give some poetry to its name: orange roughy. Oh tasty, despite its mucus-exuding head-that's gone long before your dinner plate. A mild meat, firm, lowfat, fished a mile beneath the waves. Slow-growing, long-lived: up to ISo years. In the lightless depths it's brown, not orange-when you pull it up each blood vessel bursts in its version of the bends? I ate it, twice.

I'll eat it again when it's over being over-fished, if so. But rather than its flanks sauteed in this or that I'd like to swim and roll inside a shoal of them, down there where nobody goes, to know what they know, to not know what I know, down there with the hoki, hake, rattail, oreo dorey, my dear slimeheads, and their countrymen, the shy, prolific squid.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated May/Jun 1999
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