The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms by Joan Kwon Glass

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Blind Fish

In the photograph, wildflowers everywhere,
I am seven years old. In Northern Michigan,
sand shifts with my father’s mood.
We are standing in the lake,
water shimmering around our ankles.
Minnows in their nervous schools dart,
always toward each other, breathing in
what other species breathe out
below the surface. That summer, I believed
all fish blind, guided through the world
by their instincts, feeling their way home
through dark waters. I don’t know where
this idea came from or why I believed it.
I believed too, in my father. How he towered
over everything. In the photograph
he wears a beige bucket hat, fishing lures
fastened to its brim. He smiles widely
as though he’s told the cleverest joke.
I smile too because he is pleased with me,
and he is so rarely pleased with anything.
In a year, he will leave us. Signs
are everywhere—minnows darting blindly,
bait dangling on the line, the sun
radiant as pain. Me squinting up at him.
How the world can look so bright
just before it catches fire.

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