by Pauletta Hansel
Yesterday's kindness—one small grayfish
in a puddle of river along the concrete path,
scooped up in a broken Styrofoam cup,
returned to the water, receded now into its banks.
Carp, said my fish-saving husband.
If this were a fairy tale,
it would have been a silver trout with wishes.
Not even a thank you, my husband said.
Pestilence. Flood. Next comes locusts or is it
the volcano in Yellowstone about to spew
ash on our sorry heads. Downstream
we read scrawled on the floodwall,
“We are a balloon in a world full of pins.”
I say we are the pins, the earth soft beneath us.
Copyright ©:
Cincinnati Review, April 2020
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