Eight years old on the Puget Sound fishing for flounder,
up out came an enormous, 
parasitical specimen
one could only call a 
spotted great white

I fell backward in the boat crying. Who did this?
Why? He flopped 
there, seconds from death, 
in the bottom of the white splintered boat, gills reaching 
for water, fingering the air

I was happier before we 
caught it

When the flounder quieted and 
was unhooked, he went back in the water,
but didn’t swim away. Papí looked like a stack of sad Christmases,
he was flying back for work in seven hours, 
and I could only cry because I loved him so.