MORDACIA PRAECOX THE AUSTRALIAN BROOK LAMPREY,

which might be mistaken for the common Short-headed Lamprey

Written by Kathryn Reese
River monster, no larger than my palm, buried in sand
so that we didn’t notice you. That was my strategy, too:

stay invisible, stay deep—don’t—god, don’t let them see—

but if you are churned up and spat out
from a yabbie pump into a blue bucket:

try to be someone else—they can’t see who
you are by your genes. Only by dentition.

What’s in your mouth? Spit

freshwater, sand, tannin-stained organic
detritus and awkward incisors.

They squeal and call you cryptic, cryptid, Dracula fish—

but you have sworn off blood. You graze
where you spawned, buried in sand,

hiding a mouth full of barbs.
You spend your days re-arranging your foregut

until you have no need for river debris,
the algae, the bloom. That was my strategy too—

Don’t eat. Shrink myself so small as to seem harmless—

God, don’t let them see my teeth.

.

Kathryn Reese is a poet living on Peramangk land in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical science and enjoys solo road trips, hiking and chasing frogs to record their calls for science. Her poems can be found in Gone Lawn, The Engine Idling, & Kelp Journal. Her flash fiction “The Principal and the Sea” is published in FlashGlass and was nominated for the Best of the Net anthology.