Gabrielle Bates
Gabrielle Bates is the author of the poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023), a New York Times Book Review 'The Shortlist' pick and a Chicago Review of Books 'must-read' book of 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Bates currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. A Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, her work has been featured in the New Yorker, Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, The Slowdown show, and elsewhere. She has served as visiting faculty for a variety of universities, arts organizations, and museums, including the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers' Workshops. Source
Salmon
My father and I sit at a sushi bar in my new city
sampling three different kinds of salmon nigiri.
He tells me about a great funeral speech
he recently heard a son give for his father.
The speech was structured around regrets
everyone assumed the father didn’t have,
interspersed with hilarious stories involving boys
crashing the family van and fishing mishaps.
The ivory salmon is pale and impossibly soft.
The sliver of steelhead, orange enough
to pretend it’s salmon. How else to say it.
I am my father’s only child, and he is my mother.
We dip our chopsticks into a horseradish paste
dyed green and called wasabi. I know his regrets.
I could list them. But instead at his funeral
I will talk if I can talk about nights like this,
how good it felt just to be next to him,
to be the closest thing he had.
Published:
2023
Length:
Regular
Shorty
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2024
Themes:
Death & Loss
Family
Food
Literary Devices:
Couplets
two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit
Sensory Detail
words used to invoke the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell)