We are excited to share Murgatroyd Monaghan’s poem, “Thumbs.” This piece was the Grand Prize Winner of the 2023 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize.
Judge Mercedes Eng had this to say about the poem:
The winning poem, Murgatroyd Monaghan’s “Thumbs,” hooked me with its evocative imagery, and tenderness for fish kin. It offers humane fishing advice –“You should always kill a fish right away”—and how to do it—“Take a deep breath, reach with your thumbs / Deep into its glistening neck, and just // SNAP” that speaks to the necessity of mercy, the mercy of an immediate death rather than slow suffocation, and of protecting a daughter fishing with her father from witnessing fish suffer asphyxiation. I feel the slippery fish convulsing in my hands, desperate to escape, I see myself trying and failing to kill some being I’m going to eat because I can’t decisively break their neck. The poem oscillates between human and fish perspective, deploying unexpected metaphors of nation, asylum, and language, an affective, empathetic work complicating the binary of human and animal.
Thumbs
Murgatroyd Monaghan
1.
You should always kill a fish right away.
Before the panicked jerking grows a dull, defeated rhythm
Before the muscular propulsion that you do not expect
Thrusts its body from your trembling hands onto your gritty boot prints
Before your daughter screams.
Yes, if you are a fisherman, you must kill it,
Though if this is your first time, it may
Feel abhorrent to your fingertips to do so.
Take a deep breath, reach with your thumbs
Deep into its glistening neck, and just
SNAP.
You must do this.
Because once the fish has seen you,
Once it knows of your intentions,
Its nervous system changes. It alters
Course, diverts all energies into a struggle
For its own life, and in some cases,
The lives of its tiny embryonal children.
Nothing it will do will make sense.
Nothing it will do will save it.
2.
I do not sleep.
My eyes bulge like dry fish in burlap bowls
Chalk-wiped and scale-tight,
Ungleaming and sharp-smelling, too rusty to panic despite the throb of air and all its threadbare blankets
Too dazzled by bright light to feel the sting.
3.
Fish cannot die when they are sleeping.
All fish face death awake.
Gasping and swelling for want of moisture on fleshy boat bottoms,
Dying where fishermen float safely
The youngest fish fight to die blind.
Not old enough even at the moment of reckoning to know
They are refugees; applying for protection
To cataracts, to angiomas, to anything that will bleed
Or cloud
Or clamp on and twist away.
4.
When the fish hands you his documents
Please know that it does not want your asylum
It does not know the country of boots
Or the country of boats
Or the country of nets and lines and air.
It cannot learn your tinny language
Or follow your sounds the way they travel above water.
It has seen you now.
It will always see you now.
Do not mistake the flaring of the gills for fear.
5.
I am only tired; only dry.
I have seen you from this boat-bottom.
It is enough.
Come closer, reach out.
Yes, be brave now.
Both thumbs.
Murgatroyd Monaghan is a mother, poet, and writer of mixed descent. She teaches writing in a variety of settings, has been a finalist for dozens of national literary prizes including the CBC nonfiction prize, and is working on several book-length projects.
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