Acrylic City

Kenton K. Yee

Linemen. Alter boys. Barnes, Shell, Russo, Walsh. 
Their golden hair fanned like the bulbous bubble-
hooded oranda my father poached from Jack 
London Square and imprisoned in acrylic tanks,  

where they fitted in like my black bat hair 
never would. O well. No way was I growing up
to become my father’s tank pet. I was half-orca, 
half-salmon, destined for a life in search of. 

After high school, I migrated to the East Coast. 
Three months later, I read that Barnes had 
shot a girl, one from another tank I had admired 
through acrylic. This morning, decades later, 

Barnes’ name beneath a newsprint photo
of a wispy comet between two plump lobsters 
at his parole hearing scooped me out  
of my corporate cube back to the tanks.



Kenton K. Yee’s poetry appears (or will soon) in Kenyon, Threepenny, Cincinnati, RHINO, Quarterly West, Scientific American, Plume Poetry, TAB, Constellations, Hawaii Pacific, I-70, The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II, and Rattle, among others. Raised in San Francisco, Kenton earned law and economics degrees from Stanford and a PhD in theoretical physics from UCLA. He taught at Columbia University and writes from Northern California.