Nine Bluegills

Gutted, scaled, rinsed with the water they swam in,

lie on my uncle’s dock from which they were caught.

Loon Lake is opaque with sunset, but in the dock’s shadow

crawdads on a blue sand bottom gather for a feast.

Tonight, fish in frothing butter will brown in cast iron pans,

but now is the hour of panfish striking a mayfly hatch

as plash by echoing plash, the lake hidden by willows

and pines becomes a reflection from which the moon

rises, “born like us to kiss the water,” my cousin Vera says.

Home from frosh year at Oberlin, summoned by loons

for a night swim, she stands robed in a white towel, her wand,

a Hamm’s, foams in the glow of the kerosene lantern brought

to see my catch and to guide her back to the dock in the dark.

I’m fourteen, on my knees cleaning bluegills. 

Copyright © 2026 by Stuart Dybek. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 1, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.

about this poem

“I grew up in an inner-city South Side of Chicago neighborhood, obviously not the setting for this poem. It’s set on a small northern lake up in Michigan. I wanted, in the length of a sonnet, to recreate it as I’ve remembered. It’s fair to say it’s a poem of place, but ‘place’ can be defined as part lake and bluegills, and part the magical sensibility of youth. I hoped that would suddenly be felt when the poem makes that turn called the volta—that gear shift that sonnets are about, when a nineteen-year-old girl dares to say, ‘born like us to kiss the water.’ She really said that. And I’ve been convinced of it ever since.” — Stuart Dybek

Stuart Dybek is the author of two poetry collections: Streets in Their Own Ink (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) and Brass Knuckles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979). He is also the author of the fiction collections Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and Paper Lantern: Love Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), among numerous others. The recipient of fellowships from the Whiting and MacArthur foundations, Dybek was the first distinguished writer in residence at Northwestern University.

Read more at: poets.org/poet/stuart-dybek

www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stuart-dybek