Improv', Week 12

Flounder by Natasha Trethewey

Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
you 'bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.
Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,
circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.
This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.
She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up
reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
'cause one of its sides is black.
The other is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,
switch sides with every jump.

My Improv' :

Found Her

Twenty-five cents, twenty-five silver

circles for twenty-five times more seeds.

Hold yur hands, she said, like a beggar

in wont. I only stared, eyeing burnt ivory

lace-trim cut from greatma’s best thanks-

giving slop-top; chalk white lines flowing down

the torrents of her wrinkled wind marks. Yur

paw n’ me fed these yellow quacks for twenty-

five years, for twenty cents less the whole five,

now its upta’ yew n’ Thomas, yur ma never mind:

she ain’t much more n’ Lucky, lame and not

the same color yellow, she said. Lucy,

once Lucky, not anymore Lucky, so now

Lucy was momma in the middle oiled

a different Lucky, stained in dark Lucy—

I found her.