Catherine Ragsdale

one poem

Underpainting

I ate a fish whole because I didn’t know how to clean it.
Guts. I split fin with the tooth that got knocked out
of my head when I was eight. It’s not unlike a Vermeer.
A window in scales of light. The fish was the painting of the woman
standing in a room looking at a letter and I ate it. Everything
tasted sad, uncooked, wistful. Like swimming in
chlorinated water and swallowing a mouthful. I was
on a swing, and then I wasn’t. I looked up from the ground
and understood the word swing. It means coming back to.
It means: I also caught the fish with my hands. I lay
on my belly and held my empty hands in the water
until I thought I met a fish that wanted to be eaten.
I was a girl then, or maybe an artist. Either way,
the swing came back and gave me a kiss as I sat up.
I puckered, like in the movies. Broke my front tooth
in half and when I picked it up from the grass
it had broken in half again. I thought, this is what they mean
when they say picking bone out of your teeth. I was crying,
but I had been crying before, on the swing before I understood
swing, dental occlusion. I was baring my teeth. I was crying,
because I was eight, was two new front teeth, didn’t know
how I was going to get through it, what if all my teeth
were going to grow in as ugly as these, what if I never learn cursive,
what if I never see water outside of a pool. I didn’t know
what to get my father for his birthday so I painted him
a fish. He doesn’t fish. He doesn’t look
at paintings. Daddy cooked a fish on the grill,
broke a glass plate over it and ate the fish for the week.
The light from the fridge was gradient, he looked
at the fish like a girl looks at a letter in her hand.

Catherine Ragsdale is a writer living in Baltimore. She recently graduated with her Master’s from Texas Tech University. You can find her at catherineragsdalewriting.com or in your dreams, making you a peach cobbler.