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2022 Gertrude Claytor Poetry Prize

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by Rachael Amoruso

It smells like every muscle relaxing, sinking, my feet heavy on the floorboards, my chest open like the joint of the lobster claw we pry apart when we feast. Together. Dip the pink meat in hot butter and you are initiated, no longer seven years old and begging to bite the savory flesh of the adult-fruit. Seven years old and stuck with the salty straws, the legs that taste like salt water from the ocean but with a milky sweetness. Adults leave home and come back and crack open so their insides show and their hearts fall into the laps of their mothers and they cry. I cry, sometimes. Home smells like wet mushroomy mulch along the foundation below the sign that says Willard 1887. My nose remembers the blue concrete in the basement etched with E.W. and other W. W. W. W. Ws. I wonder if Emma regrets as much as I do.



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