SUPER-INSENSITIVE SPECIES

“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