Lewis Meyers

Poor Fish

I saw the loser in 3-card Monte
pleading with the cat who ran the game:
You’ll give me my fifty back, won’t you?
Yesterday payday, rent today.
It’s only fair, chance is unjust,
and this can’t be happening to me,
can it? But above the avenue’s rich rug
the cards continued changing places,
continued slicking through the dealer’s practiced hands,
his dry eye out only for the police.
No one looking on or moving along
took the victim’s part. Where in our
lapsed world do marks find pity?
Pity goes to animals, who can’t help it,
and who try hard to stay away from us
unless a bright prospect entices them,
a lure for innocents. Like the pickerel
I caught who looked at me. Mutely
it beseeched me in the name of all that’s holy
to save it. I ate it, soul and body.
But the hooked man, poor fish, voiced
his complaint and plea, for all the good that did him,
as I heard his cries grow fainter as I swam into
the shadows of towers dangling their lighted suites.

Author: Lewis Meyers

Lewis Meyers lived a capacious life dedicated to art, music, teaching, and politics—but his true love was poetry. As a graduate student studying with Donald Hall, he published in the Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, and Hudson Review. But after these early successes, he gave little energy to seeking recognition. For years as an academic and political activist, he continued writing poems but seldom submitted them. Several did appear, however—Antioch Review, Field, and Literary Review—during his years in the English Department at Hunter College. Before he died in 2020, he asked his wife to endeavor to publish his best work posthumously. Since his death, Diana Tietjens Meyers has placed eleven poems in Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, Five Points, Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, and Arkansas International. His book Field Notes of a Flaneur won the 2024 New Measure Poetry Prize and will be published early in 2026 by New Verse Editions.

 

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