We don’t want to eat them at first, my little sister & I. The crabs
	hard to crack, & sultry,
the smell wafting from the brown paper bag.
			And we’ve spent all day in their waters, 

dredging with our yellow bucket,  peering down 
	at their dark shells
collecting on the pail’s dappled floor. Moving like hands,
			a surgeon’s, searching a breast—one misses a leg,

heaves the water side to side. Years later, my aunt will greet me from her sofa,
	& her shirt will stir this way: rippling
as she hoists herself up, fabric loose 
			like water disturbed.  

Her bobbed haircut will slip off her forehead
	when she straightens, looking at me
as if through fog or glass—the same vacant stare 
			of all my father’s sisters

gazing through shop windows, toward the long plastic throats 
	swanning up to brunette wigs.
 The reflection of their lips across the mannequin’s pale chin 
			will swim in the glass like twin red fish.

Their fingers will absently curl their hair—my father grips
	a crab claw, ruddy from boil,
from which the body dangles limply. Get it all, he says.
			He guides the silver mouth

of the cracker down, pinches, tears the arm free, & bows 
	his lips to the meat, drawing out the flesh
still steeped with sea. Really try, he says, to leave nothing. 
			My aunt laughing

with her mallet beside him, my sister & I mimicking her
	heavy swing, smashing the husks till they shatter. 

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