The Year of the Salmon
Sophia Rollins | Poetry, Spring 2025
The summer we stopped speaking,
the salmon returned to the river.
Their bodies shimmering like living flames
in the cold green current,
scales flashing silver, pink,
and that bruised, deep red
of beginnings nearing their end.
You watched them once,
quietly, from the bridge,
hands tucked into your pockets
like you were afraid to touch the moment.
The air was thick with cedar and rain,
the gulls wheeling above us,
their cries sharp enough to carve the sky.
They always come back, you said,
but I could hear the doubt in your voice.
What does it mean to return
when the journey costs so much?
I wondered if they felt the pull as pain, or something sweeter—
an ache that keeps them moving,
even as their bodies break apart.
That fall, I found a salmon carcass wedged between river rocks,
its eye clouded over, its skin torn
but still glowing faintly.
I wanted to show it to you,
to ask if you thought it was worth it.
The river kept rushing on,
in its perpetual hurry,
pulling pieces from the flaking body
and funneling them into the mouth of the sea, agape.
__________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This poem holds the shape of a specific rupture in my life—quiet, but definitive. Like a fossil, it captures not just the event, but the pressure and conditions that shaped it. “The Year of the Salmon” is about return, and what it costs to come back to something that no longer holds. I wrote it to make sense of a silence that grew between two people, even as the world continued around them—beautiful, brutal, unchanged.
The salmon became a kind of mirror: moving forward only by swimming upstream, drawn by instinct toward an ending that is also a beginning. I saw myself in that ache, in the breaking-apart that still shines. This poem resonates with me because it doesn’t try to resolve anything. It just stays in the tension. That’s how I often feel—like I live in the questions more than the answers. In that way, this piece leaves a fossil of who I am: someone trying to hold space for beauty and grief at once, someone asking if the return is worth it, even if it ends in ruin.”
Sophia Deianni Rollins is a poet and writer based in Seattle, Washington. Her work focuses on themes of intimacy, loss, transformation, and the quiet, often overlooked moments of everyday life. She writes with a strong sense of emotional clarity, using vivid imagery and lyrical language to explore the complexities of human connection and memory. Her poetry has been published in several literary journals and online publications, including La Piccioletta Barca, Poetry Super Highway and SHINE poetry. Her writing reflects a deep attention to the natural world and the internal landscapes we carry within us, often blurring the line between the personal and the universal.
The Year of the Salmon
Sophia Rollins | Poetry, Spring 2025
The summer we stopped speaking,
the salmon returned to the river.
Their bodies shimmering like living flames
in the cold green current,
scales flashing silver, pink,
and that bruised, deep red
of beginnings nearing their end.
You watched them once,
quietly, from the bridge,
hands tucked into your pockets
like you were afraid to touch the moment.
The air was thick with cedar and rain,
the gulls wheeling above us,
their cries sharp enough to carve the sky.
They always come back, you said,
but I could hear the doubt in your voice.
What does it mean to return
when the journey costs so much?
I wondered if they felt the pull as pain, or something sweeter—
an ache that keeps them moving,
even as their bodies break apart.
That fall, I found a salmon carcass wedged between river rocks,
its eye clouded over, its skin torn
but still glowing faintly.
I wanted to show it to you,
to ask if you thought it was worth it.
The river kept rushing on,
in its perpetual hurry,
pulling pieces from the flaking body
and funneling them into the mouth of the sea, agape.
________________________________________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“This poem holds the shape of a specific rupture in my life—quiet, but definitive. Like a fossil, it captures not just the event, but the pressure and conditions that shaped it. “The Year of the Salmon” is about return, and what it costs to come back to something that no longer holds. I wrote it to make sense of a silence that grew between two people, even as the world continued around them—beautiful, brutal, unchanged.
The salmon became a kind of mirror: moving forward only by swimming upstream, drawn by instinct toward an ending that is also a beginning. I saw myself in that ache, in the breaking-apart that still shines. This poem resonates with me because it doesn’t try to resolve anything. It just stays in the tension. That’s how I often feel—like I live in the questions more than the answers. In that way, this piece leaves a fossil of who I am: someone trying to hold space for beauty and grief at once, someone asking if the return is worth it, even if it ends in ruin.”
Sophia Deianni Rollins is a poet and writer based in Seattle, Washington. Her work focuses on themes of intimacy, loss, transformation, and the quiet, often overlooked moments of everyday life. She writes with a strong sense of emotional clarity, using vivid imagery and lyrical language to explore the complexities of human connection and memory. Her poetry has been published in several literary journals and online publications, including La Piccioletta Barca, Poetry Super Highway and SHINE poetry. Her writing reflects a deep attention to the natural world and the internal landscapes we carry within us, often blurring the line between the personal and the universal.