April’s writing prompt was Fish. Here we showcase all the responses that were submitted.
Fish writing prompt: In France, April Fool’s day is “Poisson D’Avril”: April’s fish.
Mangrove
Ghost crabs
hover and shroud over
brackish silt
where bulge-eye fish
dig
in
their
gills
and take primordial fin-steps
towards the trees.
They climb roots
that rise
gasping
from the ground.
Their horizon -
the goat-scratched scrub beyond.
Behind them, the sea.
by Rachel Burrows (@rlburrows23 Insta)
Le Poisson Island
lapping waves tuck into sculpted inlets
skilled brush strokes, smoothing the grey edges
white pines stand guard, erect watchman
intricate fascicles branches, drape across a blue horizon
head to fin, expelling pure oxygen
replenishing the accepting surroundings
birds gracefully soaring anticipating
searching ~ their hunger compounding
suddenly! schools of fish, gather in protection
shiny scales generating, a dancing symphony
the centering sun Illuminating
a golden pathway, across the rippling water
mass of confusion, silver blends into gold
the piscivores circle, over Le Poisson Island
by Lori Zybala (@ecopoet77 Insta)
Walking Through Coundon Wedge Circular
With My Grandparents in August 2009.
Jack and I used to always walk
around The Wedge with you and Grandad
whenever we’d be brought down south
to Coundon in the summer holidays.
We’d walk under the weeping willow trees
you helped me along holding my hand.
The red leather of your glove would squeeze
at my small fingers as you reached up
to pull grey catkins down from overhead
and gently tickle me across my giggling face,
patiently waiting for me when I tried to grab
my own and brush it against your cheek.
We’d always make the trek to that perfect spot
you occasionally held me still so I could tip-toe
to pet horses that wandered close to the fences
that guided us on, toward the sound of the river
Grandad and Jack stood on the bridge sat over
the water hanging over their improvised fishing rod
built from their own perfectly selected stick with a
a hook from an old shower curtain tied on,
while I threw sticks of wood and fistfuls of bark
from the river’s edge watching as they bobbed,
the makeshift fishing rod jumping in the ripples.
You stood back beneath a tree calling out to us
but Grandad grinned back and waved you off
and turned to twitch the hook to try to catch
one of my flailing wooden fish floating along
before seeing me wading off the shoreline,
as he hadn’t noticed me waddling further in
the water, racing to dip in toes, hands, head.
He hurried over, hauling me out by my hood
dropping me on the grass where I ran to you.
To hug you at the waist, holding onto your coat
dirtying the cream felt as you held me back.
Since you left, I’ve only been back there once
and looked back at your ghost stood on the riverbank.
by Millie Percival (@milliep_poetry Insta)
My heritage
Every Easter month, Christian Capetonian’s look forward to Good Friday and the tradition of eating fish in commemoration of the death of Jesus, pickle fish becoming the dish that is in season for many to make.
I asked myself why is fish such a big part of our culture, our lives, our religions as colored people within Cape Town, why is there a connection to a sea creature and why are these part of my roots?
Why did my grandfather work tirelessly on a ship in his teenage years, his son working on a ship, fishing becoming a family hobby, my grandfather urgently expressing that seafood had to be served on Christmas day every year.
One must only look at our location as our ports are known world wide, including our holiday known as tweede nuwe jaar, a day that celebrates those that were enslaved but were only allowed one day of freedom per year, with fish being one the main dishes as this was a treat that was easier to catch, people from across every water, from the khoisan who had their homeland stolen to those who were malay, for one moment, everyone got to be without chains.
Therefore a plate of pickle fish isn’t just a type of meal in our households, it is a reminder that our freedom was fought for, that our lives were earned, a piece of Snoek is not just a dish, it is our history being dished.
by Liam Mick (@liammick08 Insta)
The Fish That Remembered the Ocean
The fish in the tank does not know it is in a tank.
This is what the shopkeeper tells every customer who pauses before the glass. He delivers the line with the practiced ease of someone who has repeated it a thousand times, a small sales script designed to reassure, to comfort, to erase the guilt of captivity. They don’t know. They’re happy. They don’t remember anything else.
He is wrong. The fish knows. It knows because every morning, without fail, it swims against the glass. Not frantically—there is no panic in its movements, no desperate thrashing. Just a slow, deliberate pressing of scales against the invisible wall, a ritual that has become as automatic as breathing. It tests the boundary that was never there before. It checks, each dawn, whether the world has changed.
I have watched this fish for three weeks. The pet store is on my walk home from the university library, a small, unremarkable shop edged between a laundromat and a shuttered bakery. Its sign is faded. Its windows are streaked with dust. Most people pass it without a second glance. But I stop each evening. I press my palm against the glass. The fish does not flinch. It no longer startles at my shadow. We have learned each other.
The fish knows the water tastes different than it should—cleaner, yes, filtered and treated and purified of everything dangerous, but also empty. Like a sentence missing its verb. Like a song stripped of its melody. The chemicals that make the water safe for captivity have leached out something essential, something the fish cannot name but can feel.
I know because I have felt it too. The water in my own life has been filtered of something. The air in my room is climate-controlled, regulated, safe. But it does not smell of rain on concrete. It does not carry the distant sweetness of jasmine from a neighbor’s garden. It is clean. It is safe. It is hollow.
The fish remembers the ocean. Not consciously, not the way humans remember their childhoods through photographs and scents and the half-faded echoes of voices. The fish recalls the ocean in its cells. The salinity of its blood is a fossil of ancient seas, a chemical signature written into its very marrow. The arch of its spine is a map of currents that have long since dissolved. The rhythm of its gills still pulses to a tide that no longer reaches this glass box, this sterile perimeter.
Scientists call this evolutionary memory. The idea that organisms carry within them the traces of environments their ancestors inhabited millions of years ago. The fish does not know it is in a tank. But its body knows. Its body remembers a world of open water, of predators and prey, of currents that carried it across distances it could not comprehend. That memory is not knowledge. It is something older, deeper, more stubborn. It is the architecture of survival.
I think about this when I cannot sleep. When the city is quiet and the ceiling above my bed is the only horizon I can see. What do my cells remember that I have forgotten? What oceans pulse in my blood? What ancestors whisper in the arrangement of my bones?
The biologist J.B.S. Haldane once wrote that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine. The same could be said of the body. The fish does not know it is in a tank. But its body knows. And in that knowing, there is a kind of grief that does not require language.
I have watched this fish for three weeks. I have traced the arc of its spine through the glass. I have catalogued its rituals: the morning swim against the barrier, the midday stillness near the filter, the evening drift toward the surface as the shop’s lights dim.
The shopkeeper has noticed me.
“Buy it or leave it,” he says. Not cruel, just tired. He has been here for decades. He has sold thousands of fish to thousands of customers, most of whom named them Nemo and forgot them within weeks. He no longer expects anyone to see what he sees.
I do not buy it. I cannot. The fish belongs to the ocean, not to me. But the ocean is poisoned now. The coral is bleaching. The currents are warming. The fish has no home to return to, even if I freed it. The tank is not a prison. It is a hospice. A slow, merciful forgetting.
This is the paradox of captivity: the cage becomes the only shelter. The fish cannot go back to the ocean because the ocean no longer exists in the form its cells remember. There is no wild left to release it into. Only other tanks. Only other glass walls.
I think about this when I think about my own life. The choices I have made, the paths I have not taken, the versions of myself that exist only in the quiet spaces between decisions. I think about what it means to be held by something that is also holding you back. I think about the difference between safety and freedom, and whether it is possible to have one without losing the other.
Last week, I read about a species of fish that was declared extinct in the wild. The only remaining individuals live in aquariums, in laboratories, in the tanks of collectors who do not fully understand what they are holding. Their cells still remember the rivers their ancestors swam. Their DNA still carries the instructions for navigating currents that no longer exist. They are ghosts. They are archives. They are the last witnesses of a world that is already gone.
I looked at the fish in the pet store. I wondered if it knew that it was one of the last of its kind. I wondered if it remembered the names of the rivers its grandmothers swam—rivers that have been dammed, diverted, dried to dust. I wondered if it grieved.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote about the impossibility of mourning a loss you cannot name. We grieve what we can articulate. The fish cannot name the ocean. It cannot say I miss the salt, the current, the open water. But its body grieves. Its cells remember. Its daily swim against the glass is a form of mourning, a ritual that keeps the memory alive even when the memory has no language.
I wonder what my own body grieves. What oceans have I forgotten? What rivers run dry in my cells? What ancestors press against the glass of my skin, trying to reach a world that no longer exists? Tonight, I stopped at the pet store. The tank was empty.
Not cleaned. Not rearranged. Just empty. The water was still there, still circulating, still filtered and treated and purified. But the fish was gone. The absence was palpable, a weight in the room that had not been there before. “Where is it?” I asked.
The shopkeeper shrugged. He did not look up from his newspaper. “Someone bought it. A child. She named it Nemo.” I stood there for a long moment, staring at the empty tank. The water still moved. The filter still hummed. The glass still held the shape of the fish’s passage, invisible to anyone but me. “What kind of fish was it?” I asked.
The shopkeeper finally looked up. He considered the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “It arrived in a shipment years ago. No label, paperwork and no one ever asked.”
He returned to his newspaper. I left the store.
The fish is gone. The tank is empty. The only evidence that it ever existed is the shape of its absence in the water, the memory of its scales against my palm through the glass, the weight of its silence in a world that has stopped listening.
But that is not nothing. That is what memory is. That is what witness is. That is what it means to be human when everything else is fading.
The fish that remembered the ocean is gone. But I am still here. I still remember. I still press my palm against glass that no longer holds anything. I still trace the arc of a spine that swims only in my mind.
The philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that the only task of the historian is to “brush history against the grain.” To notice what has been erased. To witness what others have forgotten. I am not a historian. I am just a girl who stopped at a pet store on her way home from the library. But I have brushed something against the grain. I have held a memory that was not mine to hold. I have witnessed an extinction that the world did not notice.
The fish is gone. But I am still here. And as long as someone remembers, no extinction is complete. As long as someone bears witness, the dead are not entirely dead. As long as someone brushes against the grain, the silence is not empty.
It is full. It is always full. It is full of the names of rivers that no longer flow, of species that no longer swim, of worlds that no longer exist except in the cells of those who remember them. I am still here. I still remember. The fish that remembered the ocean is gone. But I am here. And that is not nothing.
by Ghazifa Bashir
swim press 