My mother strokes the sand
toward her with her palm, drawing
the story out, then levels it
back with the edge of her hand.
All the while
a ghost crab, half-hidden
under a canopy of crisped
sargassum, so well-camouflaged
it's just a blur of movement,
has been sidling in and out
its tunnel, forming identical boulders
of damp sand to stack
at the entrance, a bulwark.
The story is a stone she collects from the tideline of the past.
For years it's arrived again and again,
as if something draws it back
to her mind, tumbles it,
and returns it to her tounge,
a sparer truth: once she hid
a pill bottle in her pocket,
and when the shop owner's
back was turned, pulled
a mystery snail off the glass
and dropped it into the vial of water, snapping down
the lid. When her father
saw it in her tank, he wrapped her braid around his fist and wrenched her off her feet.
A new detail brightens
the memory's aching chamber
He gave her aquarium away.
When she loosens her fist to let the fine sugar pour
through the hourglass of her hand
the crab hunches
sinking the picks of its legs in the sand. its eye bulbs, lusterless
as if dipped in black wax, fold inward in a cringe.
A mind works this way, in secret, tirelessly shaping, excavating
a refuge for the tender self.
A child steals the power she longs to have.
What's a snail's shell but a coiled tunnel.
What's the tough door but a body building no.