Catch & Release

When finally it was time for our child
To arrive, I was not allowed to enter
The hospital room reserved for those
With your last name. Instead,
I went fishing, stayed by the phone
All that afternoon as I hunted for those
Who breathe water—biding my time
Until your text that would tell me
The little girl I’d call daughter
Had been born. My friends on the Buffalo
Tried to hide their perplexion.
They could not understand why a man
Without children could fall so in love
With a woman expecting a child “not his.”
Is any child really “ours?”
And how rare is it really for a man
To dream of cradling the woman
He loves as she nurses the child
Who has only just become?
I caught a 23-inch small mouth that day,
Biggest catch of my life. Five minutes
Of struggle just to catch a glimpse
Of that goliath of the shadows.
Another ten before I held it aloft
By the gills for a picture then prepared it
For release. The metaphor’s lost
On neither of us: That little girl born
That morning the exact same size
As that small mouth I gave back
To the water at day’s end. Truth is,
I ate that fish, brought home four fat filets
I cooked four different ways for that
Ndee mama—pan-fried, deep-fried, broiled,
And grilled—the meat my Lover’s body took in
Fed back to her child, “our child,”
She insisted as she lay on the bed
That might as well have been a sand bank
Of the river that child came from,
Body-exhausted and healing while we held
Our baby in our arms—"Big Fish”
Blinking up at me, her life in my hands,
My Lover holding my hand, this child
A gift of the water we hold hard to everyday
And must learn, one day, to let go.

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Andrew McFayden is author of Fight or Flight, Visiting Hours, and Ghost Gear; Founder and Editor of PoemoftheWeek.com, The Floodgate Poetry Series, and Apocalypse Now: Poems & Prose from the End of Days; and acquisitions editor for Upper Rubber Boot Books.