Piscatology by Penelope Moffet

You can decide to be happy.
It may not work but there it is.
So what if you’re alone
in a lakeside guesthouse
bedecked with fish,
from a motion-activated bass
singing “Take Me to the River”
to cotton trout on a stringer
to pike-shaped lamp pulls
to oven mitts with catfish emblems
encouraging you to eat more chicken,
to carp-shaped candlesticks,
to bluegill in the bottom
of a bowl. Bathroom towels
with bullhead emblems.
Dusty fishnets on the walls.
Pillows covered in
embroidered salmon.
A faded chart depicting
all the western gamefish.
You can decide
the kitsch doesn’t matter
and neither does the dead grass yard
you’ve no desire to read in.
Be glad the lake, the place
the real fish live,
is near. Go swim.



Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn’t That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018), and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems have been published in many journals, including The Missouri Review, Columbia, Permafrost, One, ONE ART, Natural Bridge, Gleam, The Rise Up Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and Gyroscope.