Bass
the fly looks delicious
her pursed lips inhale it
it won’t go down
such pain
she has lost volition
tries to turn and swim
is tugged to the air
shudders at his rude touch
hangs stiff knowing herself
dead
Nice bass says the fisherman
he slips the pain from her throat
I don’t eat em
tosses her to the river
stunned, she swims into the murk
for a long time she dares not eat
then she forgets.
Marty Carlock’s fiction and poetry has been published in American Literary Review, Crack the Spine, Fiction Fix, The Griffin, Halfway Down the Stairs, Inscape, The MacGuffin, The Madison Review, MARY: A Journal Of New Writing, Menda City Press, Minetta Review, Old Red Kimono, Pennsylvania English, riverSedge, Phantasmagoria, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Storyteller, Green Prints, Hobart, and Moon City Review. For almost 20 years, she was a regular contributor to The Boston Globe and other publications; more than 30 newspapers and magazines have published some 1,600 articles under her byline. She is the author of two editions of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston. At the present time she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines, and she reviews fiction and nonfiction for the Internet Review of Books.