Elegy to a goldfish

The Medical Journal of Australia ISSN: 0025729X 7 October 2013 199 7 509-509 ©The Medical Journal of Australia 2013 www.mja.com.au Poem sliding down the English Garden of wallpaper, and that it was me who raised my leg like a dog, me who brought my bare foot slamming down on your almost nothing ribs and felt you smear like a pimple. Now that’s somethin I get to have forever. That Halloween-candysized rage, that cough drop I can’t remember when my brother and I decided to kill you, small fish with no school, bright and happy at the bottom slipping through the gate of your fake castle. I think it was winter. A part of us aware of the death outside, the leaves being burned up and the squirrels starving inside the oaks, the sky knocking its clouds into the ashtray of the city. And it might have been me who picked you up first, who chased you around the clean bowl of your life and brought you up into the suffocating elevator of ours. And I want to say it was my brother who threw you against the wall like a drunk husband, the glow-worm inch of you