By Edison Dupree
                  for Joe Cameron

One eye of the only bream
we caught that day
still hangs on a fishhook.
Far down in green light,
the barb juts from the pupil.
The yellow iris glares.

—And here comes one of that bream’s
late descendants:
hovering in close
on tiny high-speed pectoral fins.
It glares back, eye to eye,
as if it hated this alien
pod, for being so dead,
and seeing nothing.
As if there were nothing here.

But here we both are, Joe,
our adolescent faces,
engraved inside this eye
you gouged out
for bait and payback,
after the bream’s warier
smarter friends had nibbled and stripped
our last worm.
We two god-damned them all to hell.
You opened your pocketknife
as the eye watched.

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Edison Dupree’s collection Prosthesis was the Bluestem Award volume for He is a native of North Carolina, but he has lived for many years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he retired from working as a university library assistant.