"Flounder" by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is a contemporary poet, born in 1966 to interracial parents. Her poems focus on the realism of working-class lives and jobs in the South, and she often combines personal experiences with historical issues. 

Flounder 

Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
You ’bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.

Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,

circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.

This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.

She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up

reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
’cause one of its sides is black.

The other side is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,

switch sides with every jump.

This poem follows a classic American style of reflection and storytelling. The narrator is reflecting on an experience with her aunt, where race is immediately called to the foreground of the poem's subject matter: "You 'bout as white as your dad, / and you gone stay like that." On one level, the speaker is simply making a pun as she is protecting the child from the sun (making her wear a hat so she doesn't burn and "change colors"), but on a deeper level, this type of speech calls to mind an historical narrative of what comes with being black/white in America. Aunt Sugar catches a flounder as they fish, and the narrator ends up thinking about the flounder's double identity: one side of the fish is black, and one is white. It seems fair to involve the poet's life in this poem, because she is mixed-race. Either way, the beginning of the poem alludes to the fact that the girl herself is mixed-race, and thus she identifies with the flounder. Perhaps she wishes she could so easily "switch" her two identities; perhaps she feels like they are not two separate parts of her and feels badly that the flounder can never be both.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/237548