Saxophone Damage

Somebody made the mold.
Somebody’s been up to tricks.
What kind of fool went and polished up
that brass like a shiny green fish?
Spit on a rag to wet the scales,
bright as peacock feathers on fire,
and the sound calling out in a midnight swamp
notes that come undulating through moss –
not the shriek of a phone –
but the wail of the fish –
neon bar signs flashing on country roads
the cockroach in the borrowed sink
the lonely sun, so far from its own
any closer would be a mistake –
and a flash of a fin like a flash of a knife
swimming and swimming to God knows where
the wounded worm left upon the hook –
is the water like jazz for a blind fish?
as empty as a brand new spoon
dropped on its head the day it was born
an instrument with bent rods and keys.

*H. Suzanne Heagy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has had fiction published in _Lynx Eye_, _genesis_, and _Horizons_, the annual journal of the South Carolina Writers Guild, and her poetry has appeared in _Creative Loafing_. Her critical interests include early American literature and American modernisms.