A king's face is meant to be obeyed, which makes the opening of "Fishy" a small act of mutiny. "I take the king's picture / and make it speak." The poem never says "coin," but a portrait of a ruler that can be picked up and handled suggests one, or perhaps a banknote. Money is the one place where most of us meet a monarch's face every day, and Dave Bonta turns it into a ventriloquist's dummy. The face that usually stands for official authority is given a new line to say, and the line is a startling one: "Pay me in kindness."
That request is the center of the poem. Money, as the poem imagines it, would rather not be money. The speaker's trick is to let the symbol of cash value argue for a different kind of exchange, one based on goodwill rather than payment. The poem is quietly comic about this, since a coin that wants to be paid in kindness is a coin out of a job. It is also a gentle accusation. If even the king's own picture is willing to say that kindness is better currency, the system that depends on it looks a little embarrassed.
The wording of the request is carefully chosen. "King" and "kindness" are not just alliterative neighbors, since both words descend from the same old root as "kin," meaning family. The words feel like cousins, and the poem seems to hint at a version of authority built on kinship and care rather than command. That hint is my inference from the vocabulary, but the sound-link is audible even if you know nothing about word histories: the hard k of "king's" is echoed in "make," "speak," and "kindness," so the first three lines are stitched together by one consonant.
The fourth and fifth lines shift the scene from the court to the farm: "A lamb is not glad / to fetch money." The lamb is an animal that has long stood for innocence, and it is also an animal that is bought and sold. To "fetch" a price is a market phrase, but "fetch" is also what a dog does on command, and the poem lets both meanings sit together. The lamb is reduced to a retriever for coin. The sentence works as a plain statement of fact, since no one asked the lamb, and as a small moral observation about what is lost when living things are turned into prices. Because the poem uses no quotation marks, it is unclear whether these lines are still the coin's speech or the speaker's own voice. That blurring seems deliberate, as if the king's picture and the person holding it were beginning to share an opinion.
The last two lines are the strangest and the most satisfying: "Even our accounts / with wine and anchovies." There is no verb. We have to supply one ourselves, perhaps "are settled" or "are kept," and whichever we choose, the effect is the same. The ledger, the coldest of financial documents, is imagined as being balanced in wine and salted fish. The picture is of an older, friendlier economy of shared food and drink, where you square things with a bottle and a tin. Anchovies are small, cheap, salty and pungent, and nobody would put them on a coin. They also explain the title. "Fishy" means suspicious, and the poem leaves us to wonder what is fishy here: the money, the king, the whole business of accounts. The smell of anchovies hangs over the dealings as a joke and a warning.
Structurally, everything is pared down. There are seven short lines of roughly four to six syllables each, without rhyme or fixed meter, so the poem moves at the pace of speech. Most lines end where a breath would fall, which gives the statements a bluntness, like sayings. The two enjambments, "glad / to fetch money" and "accounts / with wine," are where the sense leans forward, and both land on money-related words. The long "i" in "kindness" and "wine" also gives the request and the final image a slight sonic kinship, as though kindness and wine belonged to the same world.
What makes "Fishy" worth reading is how much it does with so little. In a handful of lines it manages a joke, a protest, and a sketch of a different way of living. It stays light, even playful, and yet by the end it has made an ordinary coin seem a little suspect.