Pratik : PRATIK LA SPECIAL : MICHELLE BITTING's "An Hour North of Lee Vining, California"

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

PRATIK LA SPECIAL : MICHELLE BITTING's "An Hour North of Lee Vining, California"

MICHELLE BITTING

An Hour North of Lee Vining, California

Photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.)

Who remembers where we stopped

for jars of orange neon cheese and the tangled black

knots of faux flies my father taught me to thread,

hooks that pierced the lips of bright trout

skimming lagoons in the craggy High Sierras?

I remember ghost lines cast to blue nothingness

we watched dissolve in the lake’s dark bottom.

What did we say to each other, side by side,

swaying in the wooden dish? Or was it

just the music of the wind in trees parting

ash white branches, the Aspen banter?

Why don’t I remember reeling with the rush

of my glittering first catch, the zagging colors cinched?

I think it’s come to the moment

he showed me how to haul a fat fish up,

how to grasp it tight in my girlish hand,

the wriggling slickness releasing life

into my nervous palm as I raised it high above me

and in one grand swoop, brought the stunned head

down against our boat’s iron edge, a gavel felled,

a verdict delivered, stunning those wide round eyes

to stillness. I can be as cruel as you,

I wanted to say, with pride, but didn’t

and still don’t. It’s enough

to think of it now. Enough to toss it back,

to let that ugly beauty go.

Michelle Bitting won the 2018 Fischer Poetry Prize, Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest, and a fourth collection of poetry, Broken Kingdom won the 2018 Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. She has poems published in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, The Los Angeles Review, Vinyl Poetry, The Paris-American, Love’s Executive Order, The Raleigh Review, Green Mountains Review, Plume, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Michelle is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U.

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