Sea Stories: Hatchery by Kim Roberts

November 17, 2020 Samantha Andrews

Today, join poet, editor, and literary historian Kim Roberts as she takes us to a hatchery - and the journey of a salmon, from birth till your plate.

Hundreds of tiny fry crowd the single tank, churning the water milky. The fry grow to parr with wobbly, thick black stripes as if drawn in a child’s hand. The parr grow to smolts, released into ponds. As they smoltify, they turn silver, grow scales. Their ponds go saline and they grow, they fatten. They bulk up, fish up, they chinook, they chum, they coho, they sockeye. They don’t run, or redd, or spawn, or kelt. No ocean, no river, no homing. No anadromy. They don’t properly pink so far from habitat. So they’re fed a food made from themselves; they are cannibalized for color: soylent salmon. And they are fed twice as many pounds as they grow— a crazy economy. Still they are created in the thousands, packed into writhing tanks like shooting fish in a barrel. Three years from artificial insemination to the flap of a caudal fin, to the bagel on my plate.

Hatchery has been reproduced here with permission from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.