Amber Adams

The Men in My Family Die Young

If you want to know what a man really feels follow the fish.

When I was young, my grandfather carried my Barbie dolls around in his breast pocket next to his pack of smokes. He called them “his girls.”

Greenback cutthroat trout were once thought to be extinct. Now, they are considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Fishermen holding up catch for photos are often squeezing the heart of a fish.

When I was little, I had a whole school of Barbies but only one Ken. He was Marine Corps Ken and he wore white gloves.

My grandfather had a fish cleaning station behind his garage. It always smelled faintly like rotten spines and hot ink.

At the age of thirty-five, my father’s open-heart surgery left him with an artificial valve. He no longer has a heartbeat. It now clicks like a casting reel.

When you clean a fish, you cut the belly from the tail end up to its throat. Then you hold the jaw while pulling the insides out. You wrap the guts in newspaper.

My father used to call my sister and me “the girls.”

When my brother was in school to become a physician’s assistant, his lab partner diagnosed him with a heart arrhythmia.

Mattel recently launched the eco-Barbie, made from ocean-bound plastics. Think of the million belly-up Barbies floating the ocean; their saran hair woven with diatoms and fishing line.

The greenback cutthroat trout is named for its coloration: its green dorsal and slash of crimson along its jawline.

Any woman who has worked in the service industry knows that a smile is the barb for tips.

Once you have gutted the fish, you submerge it in cold water sweeping out its insides until they show nothing but pink and white.

You would think it was his lungs that got my grandfather, but it was his trapper tackle heart.

If you break open the body of a Barbie, there, tucked in the dark, are all of the children she never had.

Amber Adams is a poet and counselor living in Longmont, Colorado. Her debut collection, Becoming Ribbons (Unicorn Press, 2022), was a finalist for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and semifinalist for the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. She received her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Denver and her MA in Counseling from Regis University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine; Poetry Northwest; Narrative; Witness; 32 Poems; Birmingham Poetry Review; War, Literature & the Arts; and elsewhere.