Worm Hook

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Was I feeding the worm to the hook
or the hook to the worm when
at my father’s guidance I pressed the barb
into the segmented body and worked
the squirming strand of meat
into that scoliotic pose? It must have been
from him I first heard that worms feel no pain,
the body thrashing across my palm
as I filled it with cold metal,
thinking the worm must be performing
some sort of purely intellectual protest,
or perhaps mere discomfort, and wondering how
one learns to live outside the codex of pain,
how even feeling nothing, one dislikes
the piercing shaft, the cold plunge,
the toothless swallow. And the fish, too,
I was told felt nothing, as it sucked
the worm from the hook embedded in its
cheek or sometimes deeper
in the throat, and so it didn’t bother me
too much to yank and rip
the hook clean if I had to, an unpained fish
working its fruitless gills across
the slats of the dock, a trickle
of blood leaving its mouth, then polluting
the water in the Styrofoam container.
We spent whole days
like that, offering the unfeeling
to the unfeeling until
we had a bucket full

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