History Lesson
Poem by Claudia Emerson •
Photo by Vicki Day
 They have been half-listening to a lecture on the Great Depression when the teacher looks up, begins to talk about the president and trout fishing—a digression, he admits, that will not be on the test. Hoover would catch too many trout to eat and so had a small, cement pool constructed where he’d keep the fish for days, calmly reading at the edge of the water, absentmindedly handfeeding them beefhearts brought in from Washington as though to tame them. Later, the girls can think of nothing else, circling the goldfish pond, throwing bits of a dinner roll onto the surface, the fish rising to them through water so still their slow refusal to school is its only motion. Previously published in Shenandoah. |