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Sucker Fish
Calvin Olsen (Boston University, USA)

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Unlike the river fish
there wasn’t much fight in him.
I say him because you can tell
the boy fish, especially once you
flay them: they ejaculate
when you slit their underbellies.
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We flopped him against a rock
over and over. His head fell off.
It was funny. We looked
down his throat and moved
his guts around with our fingers.
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His heart was beating, but
it wasn’t attached to anything. Was it
knocked loose? We put it on a rock.
It looked like a lopsided cherry
trying to breathe. It didn’t change
colors; just kept throbbing, pushing
air where the blood used to be.
Let’s chuck it in the sloppy joes
someone said. Mr. Mefford
never knew about our secret
ingredient. He laughed at us
struggling to push each other
off the dock, shirtless.

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Calvin Olsen was born and raised in Idaho. He received a BA in English from Brigham Young University, and is currently finishing his MFA at Boston University. He recently returned from the Iberian Peninsula where he completed a translation project as a 2011 Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. He works as an editorial assistant at AGNI Magazine. He has work forthcoming in an anthology, Fire in the Pasture, and his writing has appeared in The Honeyland Review, Clarion, Cicada, and others.

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