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Parrotfish as Metaphor by Xiomara Jean-Louis

Xiomara Jean-Louis

Like languid coral,

I lay motionless in the hospital bed.

The tides had little effect on me

Beneath the surface.

Ebbing and flowing,

Tears stopping and starting when I awoke,

But stared blankly like

A tourist disappointed by bleached life.


Three days,

Immovable and scraped, scraped, scraaaaappeed,

By an ambitious parrotfish seeking a meal

From my flesh like a

Nurse searching for a vein.


My favorite memories would travel past the beak,

Entering the intestine pulverized and sand-like,

Each spec of wistfulness and

Hope of a life unaccomplished,

Begging to be reincorporated in the ocean bed as new,

Healthy sediment.


STRUCK by a spear

Fishermen swift and ominous

Threatening my security and purpose

As a host of other lives lived and one without.

The parrotfish flees and the swirls

Of sand, memory-less

Awaken the coral from a white stupor.


Not halved, but not whole,

The coral separates for reclassification.

Having always been coral,

The scientists, despondent yet ruthless,

Examine the new grooves unstudied,

And begin using a new name.


Curious and unsatisfied,

The name rolls around a spurious tongue,

Before rocking to a stop.

The parrotfish returns once the coral is free to flourish anew, under its right identity.


Author’s note:

Parrotfish are unique fish with beak-like outer jaws that they use to scrape algae and other mineral from coral for food. The scraped material is ground down to a sand by a second set of jaws in the throat, then passed, where it settles onto the sea floor to mix with the other sands.


I attempted suicide in November. I am also a transgender woman. This poem was written to process my father using my real name after losing me, even for a moment, and how that makes me feel.


Xiomara Jean-Louis (she/her) is a Caribbean-American, first-generation graduate student studying Caribbean colonial histories. She orients her career around giving back: she volunteers, writes about U.S. policy toward Haiti to instigate change, and advocates for queer rights. In her spare time, Xiomara writes about her mental health and queer experiences. 


Instagram: @xianevis_


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