Sucker Brook was only fish part of the time.
It was always crayfish and shale and a copper-colored bed.
It was hellgrammites. It was tiny leeches
between puckered toes after wading an entire afternoon.
It was never dipping a line in that water even once—
instinct never registering in my boyhood
mind to do anything else but wade in it, play in it,
scrape my knees on its rocks.
In me as a greedy curiosity for water, for the outdoors,
for the uncharted backwoods bird, animal, fish-filled places
where I felt hidden.
But water spoke the loudest—
wooed me before dawn, straight through lunch and dinner
and on into firefly evenings.
Matt Smythe from the Finger Lakes region of western New York. An Army veteran and lifelong outdoorsman, Matt suffers from an inability to sit still. If he’s not in the woods, or on the water, he’s scheming ways to get there. His work has appeared in Free Range American, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Fly Fish Journal, The Drake, Southern Culture on the Fly, Revive, Midcurrent, TROUT Magazine, and a handful of other non-outdoors-related magazines and literary journals. He recently published a book of poetry with Dead Reckoning Collective titled Revision of a Man.
Follow Matt’s blog, Glorious Mayhem here.
Radical Fun is coming in hot — our art show-meets-spectacle is crashing onto the scene soon, and it’s bringing The Grape Rebellion with it. We’re talking boundary-pushing visuals, bold voices, and a wine bar in a damn vault.
Get ready to sip something subversive, soak in the electricity, and celebrate the opening of a space where rebellion tastes like cab sauv and looks like a molotov cocktail of creative fury. Witness the witnessing on May 10th, at 139 Main Street, Beacon, NY.