Casey Jarrin

Casey Jarrin is a writer, artist, educator, survivor, and outrageous dreamer whose poems excavate bodies-genealogies-prehistories alive in us, finding possibility in garbage and seaweed, sexiness in deep-sea fish and string theory. Her poems and essays have been published in Irish and US journals (Banshee, Washington Square Review, Belfield Literary Review, KGB Literary Magazine, Bright Lights Film, Periscope, Éire/Ireland) and her prose "Sex, Death, and Renting" will appear in a forthcoming feminist anthology from Spout Press. She received second prize in the 2022 Goldsmith Poetry Prize (Vona Groarke, judge) and third prize in both the 2021 York Poetry Prize (Kim Moore, judge) and Fingal Poetry Prize (Adam Wyeth, judge). Her poetry journey began performing at NYC's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, exploring poetry as speaking out-and-towards-others and poems as empathy machines, and she's since been invited as a featured poet at the Over the Edge and Lime Square Poets reading series in Ireland. Her writing cannibalizes experiences as a once-upon-a-time New Yorker, adoptive Dubliner and Berliner, and Jewish-Catholic mutt navigating the horrors and pleasures of living inside a female body in 2022. After surviving her Ph.D, she taught literature/film and queer aesthetics at Duke and Macalester College, before launching Live Mind Learning. She is now completing her debut poetry collection, The Naked Dinner.  www.caseyjarrin.com  |  Instagram: @drj_liveeye

Not Like Other Fish

                                   I.                                   I met a coelacanth                                   by moonlight.
                                   He told me stories                                   about the Mesozoic                                   wiggled his sea                                    whiskers
                                    promised to share                                    a secret                                    if I would                                     light his cigarette.
                                     II.                                     I rifled through                                     my pockets                                     for matches:
                                     I found a box                                     but he was gone.
                                      III.                                     Our conversation                                      haunted me                                      for weeks
                                      I watched Attenborough                                       documentaries on loop                                      looking for clues
                                      I called a friend		                      in Madagascar —		                      it was no use.
		                      IV.

		                      I closed my eyes		                      and sketched his face		                      with a soft pencil
		                      the portrait		                      ended up looking		                      exactly like a stranger.
                                      V.		                      I buried the picture                                      in an anonymous                                       dumpster
                                      sometimes you need		                       to let a dream go.
                                       VI.                                       Years later                                         in the Sunday papers                                        I read about                                        a retrospective:
                                         the full-page review                                         lauded the Artist’s                                          profound sense                                          of History
                                         then warned                                          these photographs                                         will get under                                          your skin
                                         concluding                                         you may even                                         forget this is                                         the work of                                         a fish.		
	

                                                         coelacanth: prehistoric deep sea fish who lived during the age of dinosaurs, ancestor to lungfish and tetrapods, long thought extinct until two species were found in the West Indian Ocean in the 1930s; the oldest known coelacanth fossils are 410 million years old

Casey Jarrin

Not Like Other Fish

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