Opening the Palm
- Opening the Palm
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, poetry
He remembers having to kneel on a chair and braceone hand against the kitchen table to steady himself,the other dipping into the aquarium.
The bubble-eyed goldfish dart from his fingers,but the brown sucker-mouth loach lifts from the pebblesto rest along the lines of his cupped palm.
That single moment will stretch over this boy's lifein the same way a fighting fish's fins pulse thinand veiled in the clarity of its own violent solitude,
in the same way a child's small wet fist unfurls slowlyto present to his mother the slick speckled flesh of the loach—crushed, no longer gasping—when she says, Show me. [End Page 816]
marci calabretta cancio-bello is the author of Hour of the Ox, which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, and more. She serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.
