Started It Off
Plastic trout
in the baby pool
in the back yard and
they are floating belly up
like ice cubes in a punchbowl
though without the pink sherbet goo
surrounding them of course
You think they’d design the darn fish
so they would at least orient themselves
in a less distressing way
Anyway
the children don’t know the difference
the two girls are finding they work fine
to hit the boy over the head Stop that
I shout half-heartedly from my lounge chair
the fish don’t like it
one of the girls throws two trout over the side
they lie
belly up
on the grass
I go back to my book.
And then
the boy has gone to play in the sandbox
caking himself with sand like a fish
dredged in breadcrumbs and ready to fry
The girls look like boiled lobsters
I guess the tube of last year’s sunscreen
was too old to prevent sunburn.
Come on kids, let’s go in
and have lunch. I hose them off
resisting the idea of serving up a pan of fish sticks
instead
while they are changing out of their suits
I fix four plates of peanut butter sandwiches.
It’s got to stop somewhere.
2/7/19
Claudia McGill Writes Poetry, Did You Know That? 
Despite my loathing of sand, I really loved that image of the boy covered in sand being like a fish dredged in breadcrumbs.
Thank you. I have always found the look and feel of sand stuck on the skin to be intriguing. I do not know why. I guess I felt it to be a temporary second skin? Anyway, then I thought of the breadcrumbs idea once when making dinner and the connection ocurred to me. (This is a scary look into my mind, maybe…)