Seeking Something Sweet, by Laura Ann Reed

Still Life - Fish in Red Bowl, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1923

​Seeking Something Sweet
                                        
She wakes from a dream, pads downstairs seeking
something cool and sweet. Chilled cantaloupe cubes 
would do. Better still, peach-flavored frozen yogurt. 
Instead she finds a crimson bowl that holds a dead fish 
whose open eye is fixed on her. Outside the window 
a crescent moon looms close. It seems to watch
her every move. Unnerved, she peers at the floor, 
discovers it’s covered by a shallow sea of green that laps 
at her ankle bones. As she looks in disbelief, tiny waves 
recede back to the breakfast nook, then surge toward her 
higher than before. Now they reach her knees, her thighs. 
Now her nightie’s soaked. Damn moon. Damn tides. 
All she wanted was some frozen yogurt flecked 
with peach. She’d eat the fish, but what good’s a fish 
that’s so fish-like it might as well be painted by Dali. 
Art—inedible, useless as feet on a snake.

Laura Ann Reed

Laura Ann Reed, a native of Berkeley, California, was a dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to becoming the Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She and her husband now reside in Western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and has appeared in Blue Unicorn, Grey Sparrow, The Ekphrastic Review, Verse Virtual and other journals.