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-camoflaged 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, hand tumbles it, and returns it to her tongue,
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 hand. When she loosens her fist
to let fine sugar pour
through the hourglass
of her hand, the crab hunches, sinking the picks of its legs
in the sand. It's eye bulbs,
in the sand. lusterless as if dipped in black wax,
fold inward in a cringe.
A mind works in 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.