Lew Watts

Catch and Release

I was eleven when I last killed a trout. It had been natural lakes until then—Llandegfedd, Llanishen, Lisvane—the water so clean you could drink it from your hands. That all changed at Eglwys Nunydd, the supply reservoir to Margam steel works. Each afternoon, its unnaturally large rainbows would cruise the trashlines on the windward side. This usually meant casting into a gale. My hair and clothes would stink of sulphur at the end of a day. The first I caught was almost three pounds, and I took it home for dinner. The flesh was gray. He said it tasted bitter.  

fishing for the latch
of a coal shed door—
almost light

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About the Author

Lew Watts is the haibun co-editor of frogpond and the author of Tick-Tock (Snapshot Press, 2019), a haibun collection that received an Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America’s 2020 Merit Book Awards. He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Rich Youmans, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023). He lives in Chicago.

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