Today in the mail I received a handwritten
note from a person whose illegible signature
required that I google the address to discover
its provenance. Let me restate: its provenance
was benevolent privilege. So accustomed am I
to the casual pokes and missteps of daily
interaction that I failed to be offended by,
or maybe misremembered, the incident
obligingly related inside the card, imprinted
with an abstract collage of what I think was
an Asian carp, an invasive species my son
likes to fish for in the lake and let suffocate on
shore. He lures them with sweet corn. A kindness,
he says, because these carp have no restraint.
They obliterate biodiversity and we do not
want a lake that only holds one type of fish.
Cherene Sherrard is author of the poetry collection Vixen (Autumn House Press) and a chapbook Mistress, Reclining (Finishing Line Press). A Cave Canem fellow, her fiction and poetry have recently appeared in New York Times Magazine, Obsidian III, Verse Daily, Tidal Basin Review, and Los Angeles Review. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.