(Love Song, With Two Goldfish)

Chua’s poem “(love song, with two goldfish)” charts and dissects a heterosexual relationship that fails due to the female participant’s disappointment in her partner’s inability to change their circumstances. Chua divides the free verse poem into five stanzas. There are six lines in the first, third, and fifth stanzas, and the second and fourth stanzas consist of five lines each. The unevenness of line distribution suggests that two imbalanced perspectives are at play.

The poet uses parentheses throughout the poem to emphasize the sense of imbalance and division. A pair of parentheses resembles a bowl, and the words the poet places between the parentheses emphasizes the sense of separation between the two goldfish as well as the separation of the bowl from the rest of the world. The use of parentheses enhances the theme of isolation; the goldfish are isolated from the rest of the world, bound by the confines of their bowl, and eventually, they become isolated from each other.

Parentheses open and close each of the five stanzas of the poem. The first and third stanzas revolve around the experience of the male goldfish while the second and final stanza depict the female goldfish’s point of view. As a result, the goldfish’s perspectives never feel like they intersect. In the final stanza, the parentheses form a buffer between the female goldfish’s reason for the break-up and the male goldfish’s actual inability to give her what she wants. This buffer communicates a sense of interpersonal alienation as well as a clear indicator that the fishbowl is separate from its surroundings.

The poet uses allegory and personification in order to emphasize the goldfish as symbolic representatives of a heterosexual human couple. Many of the poem’s events and the goldfish’s behaviors mirror modern human courtship practices. For example, a shared space brings the two goldfish together, much like human couples who meet because they work in the same office or live in the same neighborhood; the goldfish meet because they live in the same bowl. As well, Chua personifies the goldfish and heightens the allegorical nature of the poem by giving the goldfish familiar human characteristics and using their characters to tell a familiar human story. The female goldfish engages in flirtatious behavior when she “makes fish eyes” (Line 8) at her male companion and shows off her “kissy lips” (Line 9). As well, their break-up is reminiscent of human break-up stories. The speaker explains that the female goldfish wants “a life / beyond the / (bowl),” (Lines 26-28), reflecting her desire to move beyond her current circumstances. When the male goldfish is unable to facilitate this new life, the goldfish couple separate, and he becomes despondent.

The speaker’s personification of the male and female goldfish and the poet’s use of human gender stereotypes foreshadow the female goldfish’s decision to end the relationship. The male goldfish’s identity as “a drifter” (Line 1) and the fact that he “has nowhere else to go” (Lines 2-3) suggests that his interest in the female goldfish is a convenient distraction for him. As well, he romanticizes his interest in his female companion out of a sense of boredom and projects an idealized notion of the future onto the female goldfish when he imagines them in the ocean without revealing a plan how to get there. Comparatively, the female goldfish’s sexualized reactions to the male goldfish are all the reader, and the male goldfish, know of her, until the relationship ends. Both the reader and the male goldfish must infer the female goldfish’s thought process by scrutinizing her behaviors; this interaction reveals a flawed communication pattern that foreshadows the end of the relationship.