"Crab Ode" by E.R. Pulgar
This is a selection from our Winter 2022 Issue, guest edited by Raad Rahman. Click here to purchase the print edition and click here to purchase the digital version.
For Deb Halpern
Bless your tender sockets,
the briny meat of your arms
and legs, wide open
on the table. You go under
my nails as I dig
through a humid childhood
cracking shells open
with a mallet. I was so moved
to know you blue,
red only when boiled,
something in your chemistry adapting
to the heat. Blessed lake scuttler,
sacred ocean companion,
the receding husk of you
tip-toes to its fate,
claws at the knife aware
of a final roiling hell.
I gnaw off your head,
Saturn devouring a lesser god.
E.R. Pulgar is a Venezuelan-American poet, journalist, editor and translator. Their criticism has appeared in i-D, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and elsewhere. Their poems have appeared in PANK Magazine and b l u s h and they have designed workshops for Catapult and The New York Public Library.
