ALLEGORY

KAREN ROMBERG

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 sliding in and out

its tunnel, forming identical boulders

a 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 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

her braid around his fist and wrenched her off her feet

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.