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Blobfish


I’m happy to be your naturalist today

in this world, this day-vessel, held up by straps:

myths of creation, destruction,

punishment, mortgage clemency.

The local yardstick for success

is sunlessness; there are more evocative

songs about freedom and despair,



and really, is there anything new we can discover

about a woman in peril? A complex of

straps cross her: tanktop,

bra, purse, keychain, necklace, donate

shape, as peril would seem to. Is her

tattoo of a tight rose or of

a clenched fist with red nails,

either way, above a name



in a banner? A paper braid of belief in what happens

(announced like a bad, a regrettable hap)

girdles our awkward moon fish cloud

heraldry. Wet, flabby emblem, caught

and released, miraculous fruit

bringing a gray taste that stays.



Don’t fault that gray characteristic

droop like a stricken lid. Our middles resemble

disapproving faces, but we’re happy as

the straps of our thermal shopping

bags break and we get off the boat.




Kate Schapira

levelheaded: Blobfish


Kate Schapira’s poem summons a fish that looks uncannily like a sad, bald old man. It’s a fish that, according to Wikipedia, lives “at depths where the pressure is several dozen times higher than at sea level (. . .) The flesh of the blobfish is primarily a gelatinous mass with a density slightly less than water.” The species faces extinction due to deep-sea fishing.


The speaker, as our “naturalist today / in this world,” would surely know these facts. Although she never says “blobfish” within the poem, she alludes to the “[w]et, flabby emblem, caught / and released” and to a “gray characteristic / droop like a stricken lid.” But the poem revolves more directly around collapse than the fish. The fish is a way to introduce an ecosystem of ideas important to the speaker.


This expert, who is “happy” to share her information, seems fixated on straps. Straps start and end the piece. With the structure of the first sentence, what’s “held up by straps” could be the speaker, the world, or the day-vessel, or all three. Straps “donate / shape,” prevent crumbling in. About a woman in peril, the speaker says a “complex of / straps cross her.” Interesting use of “complex” (complication, obsessive fear) and “cross” (put to death, crucifix, betray, move across).


She who, at the beginning, is happy to explain ends up happy to conclude her journey: “Our middles resemble / disapproving faces, but we’re happy as / the straps of our thermal shopping / bags break and we get off the boat.” The stomachs of the people on the boat (Other women? There seems to be something going on with gender here, too.) look like the “disapproving faces” of the blobfish, which in turn look like human faces. This world is fast becoming populated by an ugliness that points to the existence of human features where there shouldn’t be human features. Is the disapproval a result of the desperate condition of our environment? Are we happy as our straps break because we are free from their restraint, or because we’re now bound to lose form (die)?


Naturalists study nature, things in their natural environments. Yet the speaker specifies a fish in this poem that initially seems unnatural to us. It is in its surprising resemblance to a human that the fish is ugly, in its considerable deviation from the fishness we expect of it. Goes to show that the term “natural” barely means anything, especially with all the calamity and degradation we live with. No wonder there are frowns everywhere, even at the high-pressure bottom of the sea.



– The Editors