Literary Hagfish by Amelia Gorman

October 2023 | Utopia Science Fiction Magazine

I am writing to inform you of the discover
of the Literary Hagfish, producing massive
amounts of slime, too utterly ungraspable,
too leviathan-slimy to ever pin down
in a single place as they slide around.

And you are writing to inform me
that then…there are Literary Hagfish.
Living fossils who don’t change their basic
formula for era after era. They are known
by their stoicism and formality.

We never discover metaphor
like casts in a rock. We make it ourselves
even if it takes you past the anthropocene,
me into the pyrocene and the kudzucene
wondering if we will ever clash again.

I swim with the Literary Hagfish before the ocean dries
and the skies alight, leaving me with no skies at all.
They remember before there were skies as I welcome
the aftermoon apart like a sunset.

The ocean sets itself too, but the Literary Hagfish
hide themselves in pieces of stone. That’s why we call
a rock with a water drilled hole in it a hagstone.
It’s not, but there’s no reason I can’t rewrite it that way
for my unclenchable, my unctuous friends.

At the same time, the Literary Hagfish are scattered
across the highway, you and I find our way back to each other.
We’re two trucks of Hagfish, sliding, colliding,
forced into the ruins that someone else has made of them.
We’re furious as we crash face-smash-face into the muck.
Horrified. Us, not them, they just keep producing sticky
nets to catch my imagination, holding and unholding it.

I find an oil field guide from the 80s where they’re listed
as rare but real. Again, I’m furious to share the species
I thought I discovered burrowing outside of myself,
and somewhere so unscientific. Better I read them
in your stories, which I will travel back through time reread
with fresh eyes, eyes with one water drilled hole.

Do you ever make anything? It would be too sad to say no.
Do you only make everything? That seems so monumental
the weight of it would bring the sky crashing down early
and in the end I would grieve the voices of everyone’s
metaphor chiming and clashing. Most especially yours.

Originally published in the October 2023 issue of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine.

Amelia Gorman spends her free time exploring forests and fostering dogs. Read her fiction in Nightscript 6 and Cellar Door. Read her poetry in Dreams & Nightmares and Vastarien. Her chapbook, the Elgin-winning Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota, is available from Interstellar Flight Press. Her microchapbook, The Worm Sonnets, is available from The Quarter Press.