I'm torrin a greathouse, and today I'm going to be reading my poem "Hapnophobia or the Fear of Being Touched" from my debut collection, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound.

And before I get into the poem, I just want to offer a brief content warning for childhood sexual assault. After learning that there are over one hundred thirty-two  distinct phobias & still no word for the fear of fish hooks, I think of my father, his broad hand, unfurled over  my tiny fist, the knife he teaches me to clutch, its rough handle of recycled bone suddenly gone slick against my not yet calloused palm.

The way the ice-box thumps like an unsteady heart— like I imagine my grandfather’s did, that year in the restaurant, breath snagged sharp in the back of his throat, face blooded as dawn over his crucifix’s pale gold, & we waited in shock for him to gasp back to his body’s surface.  Let me start again, my father dragged the panicked pulse, a bluegill, out from the ice. Its mouth, like my grandfather’s,  a wordless babble. Both their eyes, flat & dull as a copper ashtray. There is a word for the fear of water, but not of drowning.

Another for the fear of darkness, but not how it hides a person’s face. Sometimes, I forget the difference between an eclipse & silhouette —sorry, I’m losing the thread—I mean, my father made me hold the knife. Showed me on the fish where to find an entrance & make it open.

Blade dragged  from anus to throat. Its guts a door kicked in. Its blood escaping like still-hot wind from a kitchen in the winter where my father told me how, in high school, he wrote a guide for field dressing humans, just for fun.

Now, I imagine every animal he pries open, guts steaming like spring dirt, could be a child; the scar where I once opened, thin strip of sunset, that still aches when a lover hooks their fingers to drag an orgasm’s unsteady pulse from inside me, to leave me  gasping, eyes fish-wide & panicked. I mean, some days, I still can’t look straight into the mirror surface of glass  or a fish’s eye & there is a name for both these fears. Like, the fear of dead fish, Ichthyophobia, from the Greek  ichthys, meaning fish, but also the name which Christians used to hide their faith when it was a hunted thing.

Perhaps this makes my fear a kind of prayer, how some mornings, I wake unable to move, a body above me, eclipsing the light. Always with a man’s face. & always a gold cross, glitter & flail, strung from his neck, like a fish with punctured gills, open mouth futile  against the gilded line. Let me start again, once, my father caught a fish hook through his palm, dipped his hand  into the river & his blood— his blood was touching everything.