Long Exposure Magazine Issue 3, July 2016 | Page 6

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Three Poems by Stephen Elves

A Display of Smoked Mackerel

After Mark Doty

Splendid in rows like the silvery dead

your afterlife now lit in amber

as if each caught fire then dived

into waves of crushed ice.

Your summer skin glows oiled bronze

a tiger-burnt patina of experience:

the shimmer of youthful flash

quietened by an old gold currency;

this is the whole fish, no etiolated fillet

slit from a bodybag –

the meat needs strong company

in a sweet glisten of horseradish.

The biggest fish catches my eye:

its white stare from a hollow socket

half-winks at me to unwrap its silk

chevrons, strip it to the nub.

I want its dark flesh: its eye,

drowning in dry air, wants mine.