My Dream About the Family Dinner

by Hiba Tahir

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It begins with fish—: A single afternoon’s sprawling 
catch. Crappie and bluegill and bass smeared 

across my father’s bloodied knuckles. Tenderly,
he guts them, chops their heads into a bucket

from where their wide eyes watch, unblinking. 
The death stench treads air and climbs

into dusty chandeliers, hangs above us hours 
later when we push naan through fish curry. 

How was your day? my father asks. 
In my plate, fish gape at the horror

that befell them. Fine, I say, 
and hidden scales rake

my gums, leave them bloody. 
How was class? he asks. 

Fine, I say, and fish flesh sinks
to the back of my throat, chokes me. 

Moted dustlight illuminates the carcass
in my father’s plate, and suddenly, it’s his

father’s plate, and his father’s father’s, and his 
father’s father’s mother’s before him. 

I pull current, tread blood, push pin bone. This 
is no family dinner. These are my ancestors,

and they’ve got a treble hook in me.

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Hiba Tahir is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council. She currently serves on the editorial board of Nimrod International Journal.