Rejection as Considered Through a Close Reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish”
It bumped up beside my boat,
a tremendous rejection bumping against my boat.
I thought, Wow — that looks like hooks in its mouth.
It hung, “a grunting weight,”
dotted with commas like sea-lice.
Not only that, it had terrifying gills
“fresh and crisp with” my blood.
I thought: Well at least I went through
Submittable
and this rejection is not packed in an envelope
with bones, the little bones, the bigger bones.
I was impressed by the mechanism it set up
to reject me. The mechanism in my chest,
mechanical like the jaws of death.
My lower lip trembled.
Good god, I felt like an angry teenager or Ovid.
I’m chained to a rock and crows are eating my liver.
But no, this rejection was aquatic,
and it bumped against my boat again,
half in and half out of the water.
It was a prize winning rejection
bearing tattered medals.
It was so shiny, and it was spreading oil
like a terrible tanker.
It was all teeth and long beard,
the “beard of wisdom,”
whereas I am a woman, beardless,
and aching and suspicious of wisdom.
The rejection brimmed over the boat.
It was everywhere I looked and also
clamped inside my liver
and weirdly at the tips of my fingers
and swimming behind my eyes
like a hollowed-out monstrous zucchini
the size of an unreluctant dildo.
I counted. Yes, there were at least five hooks
in its mouth and it was telling me:
Why are you writing so much?
Have you forgotten you’re not interesting?
Through big gills it kept on breathing,
a polka dotted raggedy thing
hammering my boat with its arrogant swim bladder.
It was like the tipping
of a jar of old mayonnaise in the refrigerator.
In its day it broke the lines of the biggest writers,
bigger and bigger and bigger,
the kind of writers who never worry about paying rent,
the kind with book tours!
And as I held the rejection
over the boat I stared and stared.
Oh what a victory for the rejection.
I stared, like I just said,
I stared. And that’s when
the rejection battered me
with my boat’s own gunnels—
whatever those are–
until everything
was no-no, no-no, no-no, no!
And it let me go.