Poetry
1 min
These Two Crabs On the Green Line are Going to Die
Francis L.
They lay silent on my lap in a metal
bowl part-filled with water. Soon they will
bowl part-filled with water. Soon they will
be boiled, but right now they are, like me,
passengers on the BART train as it meanders
from seaside peninsula to secluded East Bay.
For the crabs—which now stretch out
their claws and add their attempts at a
fearful clacking to the background chit-chat
and the whooshing of train on rails—it is
the farthest they have been from whatever
waters they called home. Next to me sits
a man or woman, sleeping out of reality
and into the world of dreams. Are the crabs
envisioning an equivalent phantasmagoria?
Is there empathy in that brown-black shell
before it boils to the blushing red of its death?
Each train announcement is foreign to the crab,
just as the map or schedule is foreign, just as
the lives of other people remain unshakably
foreign to ourselves. I have reached my stop.
I am getting off. I take the crabs with me.
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