Play 'Misty' For Me

by Trout Fishing in America

‘I am a little too misty’

Either meaning foggy, or meaning nothing at all, she was from a part of Europe that travel agents would pretend exists.

             unfortunately there was something charming about her - the kind of charm that women pluck out when unimpressed. The barman overpours many distinctions. 

Look at me…

The women here act like foxes in the morning-

She smiled when I asked her about Hungary. I could sense she wanted to pretend to care and tired of real politics I put my hand in at circus criticism. This room is too dentist for a farce.

 Growing up with designs for the big desk, I had always wondered how they would have my name. She took it over ice, and settled her accounts against mine. 

I’m as helpless as a-

Later, I caught her putting on her face back on in front of the bathroom mirror. It was unbecoming of her to handle eyeliner like a wrench. She had a very particular set of designs. 

And I feel like I’m-

Women are very beautiful outside of poems. 

I can’t understand…

We went north that summer. She could not pronounce ‘fjord’ and I could not afford to drink. All the better for it - she became comparable when she was drunk. These kinds of women are rarely drunk in public. 

I get misty…

In abstract, best as relational. As in ‘like’, or here is the man with the crooked cap, and therefore he will steal my wallets. These likenesses will choke us. 

When you’re not around.

We have half a million words. Very few things are best not being what they are. I like that. I am very well versed, far more versed than her, in the subject of myself. 

Great pains in research have understood me as distinct from most and if not all other things, and so the poets have us here, as in ‘this is where we bury the sonnetman’, and we can all drink to that. An odd stress on the first syllable, what Ella can’t understand, as in un-derstand, as in das ist der stand, under which I am buried. Women are very beautiful (like ice; bastard). I am not particularly misty no longer. 

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA is either a world-weary Minnesota fisherman just trying to get his big break, or a second year History student at Oxford that you can find on Instagram as @kit.r.h. It’s up to you!

Art by Esther Goddard