A Midnight Fishing Expedition

They’re always trying to impose new laws on us. Fishing laws. As though the old ones weren’t bad enough.

We can’t fish here, we can’t fish there. Luckily their habitats move too.

We’ve learned to wait until dark, so they can better see the luminaries we hand form our ship; anything we can find really, Moroccan lamps and Japanese lanterns. But they must be in shades of blue or green.

They draw up to our ship, curious as wide-eyed children too a strange newt appearing in their stream one day, nibble the rotting plants with their toothless mouths.

They don’t notice our nets until they’ve surfaced.

We try to capture them more swiftly now, so their light doesn’t go out. So they don’t mistake our fishing for the sun rising and drying out the ocean bed. They don’t seem to notice it is nighttime. It is always nighttime when we fish.

We capture the light of a few of them, but the rest sputter and go dark, like blown-out candles.

Those ones we toss back, and they are already phosphorescent, bursting with light, in the air, before they hit the water. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay