Lobsters
Matthew Walsh
In Italy you can be fined for boiling lobsters
alive. Then my mother is a monster.
She knows at least three ways to kill
them. She sees a guy upshore
when she feels the urge and get him to load
the poor guys into the trunk
of her car. Once she was stopped
by the police. She said oh hello officer
I`m just trying to get my kids home before dark
in her best Mom voice. She continued driving
and carried them through the downstairs door.
She would get others involved. She would call her mother
and say the eagle has landed and my grandmother appeared
out of nowhere with her big black pot, hammer,
and screwdriver. Lobsters were food for criminals.
Always I wanted to rescue one of them.
I said it would be a good pet. We could keep one,
but the lobsters would bubble language
in the link or one would swim without the water.
I thought the lobsters were poor lobsters.
My mother would actually smile as she salted
the water and then said okay, I’m gonna throw’em
in, and the lobsters would be destroyed by hammer
and screwdriver while she sucked the meat from their legs,
Shells of their former selves. She became a total murder
machine. My mother would leave me to hide
the evidence, in the bushes is best she said. She’d been doing
this a long time. I have no idea what possessed her, sharing
around the potato salad, a dust of paprika, sliced egg—
my god did she ever enjoy it.