soft shell
Emilie Collyer
the doctor pries me open like a crab
she says the pain is from the medication I’m on I know it
to be a personal flaw
this tendency to crustacean
I am a Gemini but my father was
a Cancer and he used to play crab with us
he’d lie on the floor snap snap would go his
pincer hands
his fingers red or was that his breath singeing my skin
when he died two hairs sprouted from my chin tough
as coat hanger wire strange antennae
I would lie on faded rose carpet floor sundrenched reading Anne of Green Gables the imagined tang of crabapples sharp on my tongue
determined to never become a Marilla old and bitter
Mrs Krabappel from The Simpsons taught me that while spinsters might get a second bite at love they will still die alone
life has splayed me lying here with fists clenched under buttocks
as instructed I don’t think of
England but of poet Anne Carson who has Parkinson’s disease
and is boxing to stay agile
hook hook upper cut
relax I shout at my cervical muscles but they will not
Carson rolls her wry Canadian eyes bemoans how much
of her work is autobiographical but what else can we write about she shrugs and sighs about
wanting to be at edge of things not the centre
I’m like but Anne you ARE the centre leave the edge to those of us
scrambling for footholds
I think about the dismal goal of therapy to know all the shit about our selves
we are unable to change
about Cain killing his brother because God loved Abel more
there was no redemption just a long life as a jealous unlovable murderer
I hard relate to Cain on at least two of those counts
about the crab Hera sent to torment Herakles—classic step-mum move—why can’t you just support me?
snap snap at his ankles
Herakles clubbed it to death
Hera put the crab in the stars
did you know crabs can evolve from ocean to land and back again
we could learn something from their cheerful determination to transform over billions of years
cancer [named for crab—its claw-like spread] cells are avid adaptors
my breast has already excelled
how I studied that white smudge on the scan
how determinedly it tethered to me
people keep trying to retranslate the Greeks a reparative urge
or as Anne puts it her soft condescension when people send her words to fill in the gaps of her Sappho translations
they’re just trying to make good the holes
the doctor finally gets purchase with her speculum
its deep click surely takes
a chunk of flesh
but no blood slicks
I crawl off the examination table and scuttle
back into pants
she peels off her gloves I thought I was doing okay but turns out I am
unbearably soft in places
I can
no longer locate
when the menu says soft shell it means this critter
was caught after shedding its exoskeleton
trying to grow
Note: Due to formatting, readers will experience this poem slightly differently on a laptop versus a mobile device.
EMILIE COLLYER lives on unceded Wurundjeri Country. She has two poetry collections published by Vagabond Press: Do you have anything less domestic? (winner Five Islands Prize) and As If I’m Really There. Her poetry has been recognised in Gwen Harwood and Newcastle poetry prizes and 'soft shell' was shortlisted in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize.
