HAMMERHEAD, 1991

by Johnny Cate

It hung from its tail beside the angler who,
hands on hips, told the small crowd it took
twenty minutes to reel in. Upside down,
its open mouth could have been a smile
and I could've been swallowed whole—
so young the ball of my father's shoulder
was huge and godlike as he crouched,
arm around me on the Hatteras dock.
The hammerhead's jaw was stained carnation,
its belly corpse-white and grossly exposed.
The coastal wind hit its hanging dorsal fin
and the body on its rope turned until
the ridiculous head was crosswise the line
of spectators, and one of its black eyes
sized us up. I took a step back. Then, the man
who caught it cut it down and it slapped
the dock-slats with rubbery numbness,
rolling slowly over—its mouth-breather
countenance confronting us again. It was dead
and meant it. For a grand finale, the fisherman
brandished an old buck knife before plunging it
into the shark's boneless underside. He wrapped
both hands around the hilt and hove it through,
goring the abdomen with one swift yank.
Before he could even withdraw the blade,
the hammerhead's guts slid out with blousy
abandon, a shapeless mess of messed up shapes,
wet with the blood it had loved.

Johnny Cate is a poet, copywriter, and vintage T-shirt collector from Asheville, NC.