If fish sang we should have to keep them in cages and then they would die because the water would all come out.

–Ramon Gomez de la Serna

The King is Back! Blue-green & silver-sided repository………….. of Omega 3’s Oncorhynchus tshawytscha. One hundred years later he had no scroll left by Grandpa. She had no treasure map left by Grandma. They had no GPS to re-find the lost land behind Elhwa dams & 150 days after the dams were sent back to hell; 150 days after the long delayed blasts (one small step for man, one giant leap for Chinook Salmon); 150 days after they done blowed up what outn’t a been there anyway, the King returns.

…………………He’s back! He’ll be needed to feed all those Cracker Climate Refugees whose Texas crude’s burning all creation. He’s back! Belly full of planktonic diatoms, copepods, kelp, seaweed, jellyfish, starfish, bugs, amphipods & crustaceans so delicious served up at Sakura as sake or sakekama w/side of Mu poured by Sam.

…………………He’s back. The King found his pitchflare/prepares herself for the banquet & the initiatory forge long foretold.

Welcome to Cascadia
…….climate refugees. Leave yr religion
………..back in the flatland & don’t forget
…………….to say………………… grace.



Father/poet/teacher Paul Nelson is a Chicago native, founder of SPLAB (Seattle Poetics Lab), founding director of the Cascadia Poetry Festival, and author of a book of essays on poetics, Organic Poetry (2008) and a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, Washington, A Time Before Slaughter (2009, Apprentice House). His most recent collection is Pig War (2015, SPLAB).



Photo credit: Chinook salmon at Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, Seattle by Josh Larios, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0.