Seeking Something Sweet
                           After Salvador Dali, Still Life - Fish in Red Bowl 1923–24*

by Laura Ann Reed


She wakes from a dream, pads downstairs seeking
something cool and sweet. Chilled cantaloupe cubes
would do. Better still, peach-flavored frozen yogurt.
Instead she finds a crimson bowl that holds a dead fish
whose open eye is fixed on her. Outside the window
a crescent moon looms close. It seems to watch
her every move. Unnerved, she peers at the floor,
discovers it’s covered by a shallow sea of green that laps
at her ankle bones. As she looks in disbelief, tiny waves
recede back to the breakfast nook, then surge toward her
higher than before. Now they reach her knees, her thighs.
Now her nightie’s soaked. Damn moon. Damn tides.
All she wanted was some frozen yogurt flecked
with peach. She’d eat the fish, but what good’s a fish
that’s so fish-like it might as well be painted by Dali.
Art—inedible, useless as feet on a snake.


* * * * *

"Seeking Something Sweet" was originally published in Ekphrastic Review. Here is a link to the artwork: https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/still-life-fish-with-red-bowl-1924

Laura Ann Reed received a dual BA in French/Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently completed Master’s Degree Programs in the Performing Arts and Psychology. She was a dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area prior to assuming the role of Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She and her husband now reside in western Washington. Her work has been anthologized in How To Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and has appeared or is forthcoming in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Ekphrastic Review, and Willawaw, among other journals.