“Asian carp [introduced to control weeds and parasites] have been crowding out native fish, compromising water quality and killing off sensitive species.”
—FROM “INVASION USA: ASIAN CARP INVADERS HAVE TAKEN THE MISSISSIPPI, ARE THE GREAT LAKES NEXT?” IN SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, July 5, 2013
The Asian carp are on their way!
Thrumming waters, thrashing over dams midair.
You American engineers who released us
Into your streams and lakes, how could you forget
The Chinese Exclusion Act? Half-a-million
Top-knots wishing not only to dig and blast, but breed?
I am young and shiny in Prada at the mall.
I am hunched at the bus stop, grease stained, smoky
Lungs full of sad erhu songs. Wok & Rolling
Through your suburbs, sardine-like in a Honda.
Hard down Wall Street on a Ducati rocket at 4 a.m.,
Paddle tennis rackets in my Gucci bag clattering.
A Bel Air clinic designed to disguise how to reenvision
This land of opportunity with even wider than Western eyes.
Koreatown Peaceful Cloud on Snake Mountain tattoos.
Myriad in late-night cram
Schools of swishing bubbles like slitty
Mermaids at your sailors’ hulls.
Eating my own kind, even my own tail, to survive.
Feel our silvery fins sting through sludge and slime.
California and New York have long teemed with our disease.
Milwaukee and Chicago, how will your Great Lakes survive
Such frantic froth? From Olympia to Providence,
It’s a new day, our forty-horsepower jaws so snappingly say, so
Bend over and drop your pants
Because the Asian Carp are on our way!
Polishing your platinum ingots, boardroom doorknobs, and bylaws.
Maybe not yet the Whitest House, but fast
Scaling ourselves clean on the jagged edges
Of glass ceilings. Bottom dwelling
In deepest cyberspace. Chomping up bargain real estate.
How can the other fish possibly compete with no duck blood,
Biryani, pad thai, or kalbi sinew stuck between their teeth?
Melting pot, O.K. But not my fish head,
Not my GPA. Not my child’s yellow
Lamborghini-shaped, Harvard-bound birthday cake. Reverse racism?
Affirmative action? Quota? What you say?
Nah. We don’t roll that way.
Art of War jungle tunnels
Through your mind is our game.
And it’s too late for you to learn
How to play. Because the Asian carp
Are on our way—Dastaars turbaned
Like three times the brain; shoguns blazing
Chopsticks and perfect SAT scores like rain.
Ancient saw-toothed devils shimmying up onto land
To squirm, crawl, stutter, walk about, and one day say:
Yo, where did all the Black
Elks, Standing Bears, and Pocahontases go?
Who rode off with all their horses, confiscating their guns?
Who over-forested then pumped green muck into rivers, thinning the salmon?
Whose sugar and cotton plantations enslaved?
Who converted whose heathen souls to fill whose churches and factories?
Who profited? Who outsourced?
Who instituted internment, the H1B visa, and the KKK?
Who bombed whose families’ flesh and bones in Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam,
and Iraq
Back to the “Stone Age”?
Yes, the Asian Carp are on our way
And life as it’s known can’t help but change.
But, really, if we must fish
For euphemisms—who
Brought whose eggs and minnows
Here to invade whose waters, land, and
Purity in the first place?
from Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019) by Ed Bok Lee
