Anger is a fishing trawler

image: nick Kane

By Seán Carlson

Three pints in, pleasantries

spill an apology:

Sorry if I offend—

but still we think of boats,

as if hulls carved of tree

alone, adrift, at sea.

Long sunken are the hook

barbs fast in mouths of hake

and writhing wrasse thrown back,

some pull through punctured jaws

means of keeping one alive,

the dying weight in scales.

With gull-flap and dolphin dance

we cut scenes of angler’s line

through currents and breaking waves,

discuss not rig or warship,

or the wrench of winch-caught arms,

whose jurisdiction’s regard.

Landlocked, spare the river,

against our strength of stout

you shout, damn the trawlers

and their hauls, all taking

without leaving, a wake,

an emptiness unmoored.

Seán Carlson is working on his first book, a family memoir of migration. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, the Irish Times, New England Review, Nowhere, Oxford Review of Books, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Dappled Things, the Honest Ulsterman, the Irish Independent's New Irish Writing, Trasna, and elsewhere. Seán was awarded with a 2024 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation poetry fellowship in Bulgaria.