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A CRAB EATER

By Dewan Hookeimen



Hundreds of their ironclad raw corpses

carpet the floor around me.

It’s not that I like their brackish taste.

It’s more like payback for

the presence of yours, so cleanly blotted.

 

Uncountable books ago,

your voice was the only voice.

I can’t honestly say I remember its tune

but, anyway, like all unwitnessed fables

of love and death, even untruly,

this one deserves to be told

to all wayfarers that walk this mountain.

 

It’s always summer.

You’re wearing your implausible flowery swimsuit.

A blade of sun accurately slices apart

galaxies of freckles on your right white shoulder.

At night, we carve Jack-o’-lanterns out of watermelons.

My two names travel through herds of late summer evenings

when you call me back home for dinner.

Soon I’ll start stealing stinky cigarettes from your bedroom,

and you’ve already confessed your tender love,

at a prudent distance, for some small animals.

 

It’s not much, I know. I can’t bring back but a few summers of you.

Perhaps because it was summer when we knew that one

of those small animals had chosen your body to nest,

and it was summer when it finally ate you up.

 

I can’t turn to the erosion time exerts

equally on words and photographs for any help.

That’s all I remember of you.

So, this should be the end of the poem.

 

Let it be said, at least,

that once upon a bottle of cheap rum

and a bag full of slowly-dying crabs

I tried to tell our story.


© Copyright Dark Poets Club

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