Brian Wilson And My Dad Cut Up Fish For Bait

Poems, Paintings, and The Beach Boys

Brian Wilson And My Dad Cut Up Fish For Bait

I help, carrying a box down the stairs of our stilted rental house.

The sea-turtle-safe lights cast dim yellow patterns on the dunes,

waves crash in the dark beyond. My dad wears a headlamp,

Brian holds a flashlight between his teeth. The bodies are frosty,

fresh out of the freezer. It’s a bloody job, and careful.

They stick huge hooks through skin into soft red cartilage,

back out through the tough parts. Like knitting, back and forth,

this quiet work. I tell them to be careful, to watch their fingers.

Brian winks at me above the light; my dad talks strategy,

where he’ll set up his new bait launcher, a compressed-air-powered,

PVC cannon I bought him online for Christmas. The dunes are

all around us and I imagine sand mice and crabs watching our progress.

It saddens me, these dead fish. It bothers Brian, too. But there’s something

beautiful about it, he says when I take the flashlight, their whole bodies

returned to the ocean. They dump heads and tails into an old blender,

make a frothy slush we pour into tubes around the hooked pieces,

refreeze what my dad calls “bait bullets” to blast out over the surf,

where they melt slowly, the smell drawing in prey as the hook becomes

exposed. I think of the fish who will bite, how they might be cut up

tomorrow night. And I think of poetry, this work of making words

with other words, meaning from meaning, truth from language.

Of our desire to participate, where it comes from, who teaches us.

I love you both, I say beneath the mechanical blender sound.

It’s caught up in ocean noise, in insects, the wind

pushing clouds beneath the half moon.

“Waves, Cape San Blas,” Brad Davis, March 2024

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“Brian Wilson And My Dad Cut Up Fish For Bait” is from a series about my imaginary friendship with Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' genius who says that art, particularly music and his piano, probably saved his life. In the poems, Brian often shows up in my half-imagined memories, sometimes representing a love interest, sometimes a father figure, but always most deeply as a mirror of myself— my creativity, my struggle with mental health, and ultimately my search for (as Brian would put it) love and mercy.

So grateful to have had this poem published in the lovely 19th volume of Kansas City Voices, a journal that has featured so many artists I admire.

The bait launcher mentioned in the poem is real! Check out this video of my dad and brother shooting out a frozen bait bullet. :)

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The spring before we were married, Brad and I drove down to Cape San Blas, Florida where I grew up going with my family. It was so special to spend time with him there and see him paint the beaches and palm trees, shapes and colors that are so much a part of my memory.

My mom first found a rental on the Cape when I was in middle school, and for many years, we’d load up into the car—my parents, my brother Josh, me, and our dog Coal, a big black standard poodle—and spend a warmish week by the ocean (the Cape is in northern Florida, and our spring breaks were early).

As Josh and I got older, our Florida trips became less frequent. But when I moved home for grad school and my parents neared retirement, they slowed down their swimming pool business in the winter, renting a house on the Cape for the whole month of January. Because I was teaching online at the time, I was able to “get a taste of retirement,” and spend the chilly month down there with them. This time we took our smaller, black and white poodle Grizzly. My dad spent days fishing while my mom and I did yoga and took Grizzly for long walks on the beach. In the evenings we’d all watch the sunset over the waves and walk out onto the sand to see the stars.

My Dad, Grizzly, and Me fishing on the Cape, 2022

Before I returned to the Cape as an adult, I wrote a poem about those stars (published in my book “Bowlfuls of Blue”). It was always a magical place for me—those memories of salt spray and dolphins. But those two Januaries I spent there with my parents, before my mom passed away unexpectedly, fossilized Cape San Blas as magical and precious in my mind—the green-gray ocean and the cobalt bay, the Jurassic forests and the constant rocking of the waves.

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Painting on the beach was a bit of a challenge with the wind and sand. Brad brought his giant rolling box of paints and we laughed a lot trying to roll it around.

My poem in “Kansas City Voices” :)

We’ve added my book of poetry and some prints to our online shop! Check it out if you’d like some Plein Air Poetry in your physical mailbox.

Plein Air Poetry Shop