Hassa
Rajiv Mohabir
Blood and entrails Christmased
Ma’s green butcher’s block
at her first attempt to recreate
Aji’s specialty—how Aji, after
her husband drowned,
body picked by piranhas, went
to the trench with a stick
and disturbed the fishes’ nest
so they leapt from the water
straight into her basket,
I can hear her suck her teeth
and laugh to herself
“E rass go eat sweet,”
but my own living so far
from Ma and Guyana,
Ma froze her pan for me but
I didn’t want to eat this until
one night I had a dream
that I slipped my fingernail
underneath one plate close
to the base of the tail and pulled
it forward so all the non-scales
stacked exposing orange flesh,
I looked for the egg sac, whitish
and curry but found instead
that in the hassa’s mouth
a silver coin sparkled like four
drachma in the black water
to pay the temple tax, and prayed,
Oh, nourisher, oh ancestor-
fish, give me the courage
to charge from the water,
grunting, gulping air
when the water’s oxygen is low,
to hurl my plated body
at my attacker should
a person with a switch stir
the muddy river bottom,
my chest, a weapon in Greek,
Holplosternum, but the real miracle
Aji clung to, a secret
that Ma knew also,
was how to hide survival inside,
between the head and plates to insert
her ceramic knife, to cut
down and to push her fingers
into the macabre cavity and rip
from the meat gall, pancreas,
the Miocene lung-type vessels
and I know that somewhere inside
Ma’s heart some joy glints
from before the hurt
of the only other man’s house
she’d lived in, that Ma still
plays Anuradha Paudwal’s
cham-cham-chamke chandani
despite the dark trench
of her loneliness and isolation
from her family, this catfish
called hassar before in Guyanese
we dropped the “r” to stew
its sweet flesh with pumpkin
and I learned to re-love
this cascadoux because hassa
means laugh and that Aji
and Ma have been laughing this whole time
and that this laughing fish
is the avatar of bravery
like Aji and Ma who
without knowing where
trusted enough to live without
men in their nests.
~~~~~
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Winner of the Kundiman Prize 2015, Tupelo Press 2017) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Winner of the Intro to Poetry Prize 2014, Four Way Books 2016). To read more of his work visit www.rajivmohabir.com.