I’ve been saving this idea for a day when I was low on energy & creative juices. Sadly I was hoping it would be a little later in the month. That said, it’s tough churning out a poem a day even when 100% healthy: to do so while ill is an added challenge.

It’s definitely an unusual “poem” … a cross between a recipe & a list poem … with, I hope, an unexpected sting in the tail.

recipe for tuna mournay

Part 1:
Ingredients

1. Fish
common
anchovy, barracuda, grouper, flying fish,
cod, common sea horse, king mackerel,
Spanish mackerel, common sea bream, 
colourful
white marlin, grey triggerfish,
blue runner, rainbow runner,
black gemfish, bluefish, red drum,
greater amberjack, black ruff, yellowtail,
named for other things
sailfish, swordfish, lancet fish, puffer fish,
goosefish, porcupine fish, monkfish,
sunfish, pilotfish, dolphin fish, needlefish,
spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish,
longbill spearfish, bigeye cigarfish, stone bass,
strange
Bermuda chub, opah, escolar,
leerfish, tripletail, Murray eel,
pomfret, bigeye thresher, wahoo,
bonito, cassava fish, spotted skate,
manta ray, devil ray, 
shark
bignose, hammerhead, Galapagos,
sandbar, night, sand tiger,
copper, blue, (great) white, mako

2. Reptiles
turtles
loggerhead,  leatherback,
green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley 

3. Mammals
whales
northern right, pilot, humpback,
beaked, goose-beaked, killer,
sperm, minke, sei, fin,
dolphins
common, striped, spinner,
Atlantic spotted, bottlenose,
harbor porpoise, 

4. Birds
albatrosses
Atlantic yellow-nosed, black-browed,
northern royal, shy,
gulls
yellow-legged, great black-backed,
herring, laughing, Audouin’s,
shearwaters
balearic, great, sooty, Yelkouan,
petrel
great-winged, grey, southern fulmar, 

Part 2:
Instructions

this is
a not-so-quick list
of some of the 145 species
regularly killed & discarded
while “fishing” for tuna
charmingly known
as by-catch

*List taken from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals