READ A POEM
by Tobin F. Terry
Fishing
Dad, what’s a grist mill? a boy asks as he and his father prepare to descend a fifteen-foot wall across from Franklin Thermal. Below the wall there is a bank of pebbles, pieces of wooden wheel, mill stone, decomposed grain, and waterfalls of the Mahoning River. The falls, remnants of an 1823 gristmill dam, gush greenish yellow water. The wall separates the man and his son from Crappie they can catch, but shouldn’t eat.
The man ties a rope around an ancient oak, one that has lived longer than commerce in this town, and tells his son about the series of wheels powered by water, the drive shaft, and the wallower. The boy holds on to the rope in front of his father. The man reaches around his son, thinks about how the boy has grown fat sitting in front of the television, eating packaged sweets absent of the semivolatile organic compounds and polychlorinated biphenyls he read about in the paper.
As they step over the side, the rope frays and snaps. Falling, everything turns sepia, moves slowly, smells like mud and dead fish. On the ground the boy cries because he is scared, and his ball cap is in the water. The man laughs, because there are better things to cry about.
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“Fishing” by Tobin F. Terry, from
Emerge Literary Journal. Issue 9. ELJ Publications, 2014. Used by permission of the author.
ABOUT TODAY’S POET
Tobin F. Terry is a department co-chair and associate professor of English at Lakeland Community College, where he teaches writing and coordinates Lakeland’s annual poetry competition. He is an editor for
Chagrin River Review, communications director emeritus for the Antioch Writers’ Workshop and emcee of Words and Wine, a monthly poetry series in Painesville. Terry graduated from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program through the University of Akron; taught English at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and served as copyeditor at the United States Sports Academy in Daphne, Alabama.
WRITE A POEM
Confession is good for the soul, so
try writing a confessional – about all the things you are not sorry for.