Johnson County Library is pleased to announce that Cody Shrum has won our writing contest on the theme The Reluctant I with his poem "Catfishing the Elk City Reservoir, ft. Bugs."
Cody Shrum is a writer and editor based in Kansas City. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cody’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in such journals as HAD, BULL, Cleaver Magazine, Harbor Review, Rust + Moth, and The Midwest Quarterly. He is also a fiction editor at Identity Theory. Cody's debut collection of poetry, Green Acre, was the top finalist in the 2024 Jonathan Holden Chapbook Contest and is forthcoming from Choeofpleirn Press.
Catfishing the Elk City Reservoir, ft. Bugs
Midnight. Our boat rocks, double-anchored
in a river connected to the lake,
one of a curving mass of slivers snaking to the reservoir, fingers
running back to the den of fish and big, black water.
We sit in a swarming mass of insect buzz,
crashing wings and abdomens
against the blazoned light of our lanterns.
Insect feet on our naked faces, arms, necks, force
into our dirty clothes like the water
surging past our lines and hooks.
I pull my shirt up over my face, to breathe, to cough,
to avoid a mouthful of the dense fog of bugs.
Mosquitos, craneflies, June bugs, gnats, dobsonflies grown from hellgrammites, giant mayflies,
moths and dragonflies—
all come to devour the heat and light, primal.
All night we catch nothing but useless dinosaur-scaled gar
who steal our baited bluegill and swim around us,
sharp-toothed as sharks, long-sleek-gray torpedoes,
glaring glow-eyed from just under the empty water, winking.
Even after we dim the lanterns to lessen the swarm,
more bugs seek us out. The life of the river and trees
has already been disturbed—nature sends these bugs
like white blood cells to take us out.