Chad Frame 

Closed Aquarium Urges Humans to Video Chat Lonely Eels

What is an eel? Perhaps two tridents
and a sharp corner, or backing out

and around two cul-de-sacs, then driving
straight down the road ahead. Eel, noun. Snakelike

fish, proverbial for its slipperiness.
An eel is an ode to bonelessness, though

a hundred vertebrae beg to differ.
To scalelessness, though they come large and fanged

to small and meek, pale and opalescent
to blotchy, spotted, ribboned with color.

We ignore them, glassed in, wriggling their brief
lives, though some live twenty years. We assume

they will still be there, attending to eel
matters—eat, swim, hide, mate—when we are done

burying our dead, when the lights switch on
again in the aquarium. Look, son,

eels! we will say, the boy maybe glancing
up from his phone to see blue-hued caustics

over the long fingers of eel bodies
crooking out of sand, just a brief pitstop

on our walk between the sharks and penguins.
An eel knows what it knows, yet we cannot

bear to count ourselves out of it, jailers
needing love from our inmates, plague be damned.

From their side of the glass, our lives are brief,
ebbing ripples. We are the lonely ones.

Sumida Aquarium

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