I first met Daisy Fried because we were in the same “class” of Pew Fellowship recipients back in 1998. You can find her work in Ploughshares & you can find it in Can We Have Our Ball Back, which should tell you something about her ability to reach out to different audiences. Her book She Didn’t Mean To Do It came out from Pittsburgh back in 2001. In spite of the actual content of the title poem, I always hear that line as consciously askew – I think Daisy Fried means exactly what she does. In the Rosenbach Alphabet, she holds the letter “F.”

 

 

FIRST FISH FOLIO

 

My heart and paw smack for you as for a fish

salmoning up falls. I split froths and folios

of H²O to snatch to snare you. Daresay it is the first

 

food to starve, water to thirst

me. To you to you I cleave and claw and fish

and flounder and hake and bass for compliments in defoliated

 

rivers and mountains. And cities. Pause I, prowl I. My arms I exfoliated

for the wedding. They glowed! Firstburst

of married hours, we split a fishbone

 

wishily—for luck I mean. It stuck. I swallowed hard, my fishy

                                                             folly, my

                                                           first.