Castnet Seafood

^{for Uncle Kenny and Cousin Jeremy}

According to the local news station,
the blue crawfish is a rare thing to find,
yet it watches us from the tank of the market,
spared from a boiled, seasoned death

unlike its red friends. My uncle says joy
is the opposite of running
into a dagger, and I realize I am not
the most poetic family member

who has pain. J and I crack the spines of
the crawfish not lucky enough to be blue.
The deeper the blues, The more I see
black played above my head at the chiropractor

the day before. Stubborn I call my back,
subluxation the medical journal says.
Three times a week, my chiropractor
calls the forceful moving of my misalignment

a healthy crack. Like bullies hemorrhaging
power, we look forward to making me
almost break. I love my family, unlike my back.
Before we got here, J threaded amber and jade

and lapis into a necklace he made for me
to match the cover of the book where I’ve written
my pain. He moves, outside his box, newly freed.
He loves movement, says he understands

that toxic masculinity means to want
to pinch your claws around any smaller crustation.
I am the third most poetic in this family. He loves
the neon of the crawfish. We google what makes it

blue and we suck the sadness out of our conversation.
Like luck, blues can spare any life if you wear
it, but it will leave you as lonely as the crawfish
in the tank. I wonder what family the mudbug

came from. Were they a proud bunch? Had the brightest
shells in their swamp? Did this little blue bug love
his looks, or did he burrow deeper into the mud
because he couldn’t handle the attention his hue

attracted? We chew the back meat of the unlucky things,
stew in the love that surrounds us like a pot with our
spines and heads still attached. Look at what the
brain makes the muscle do: remember.

Joy is the membrane covering us, the tissue that keeps
a family situated around a table when they could
be running from one another. My uncle taps the murky
glass to make the orphaned thing move. He turns to us:

Could you imagine us living like that?
All hard on the outside with an exoskeleton?
No, no I can’t. There’s so much
in us. We’d fall apart.

Karisma Price is a poet and author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). A Cave Canem Fellow, she is the recipient of the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation. She is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University.

Themes

About Karisma Price >

About This Poem

“While navigating chronic pain and a newly diagnosed connective tissue disorder, I found myself self-isolating and depressed. I wrote this poem in an attempt to capture the joy I felt after spending time with my cousin and uncle. Like true New Orleanians, we vented over a large plate of crawfish, and when asked about joy, my uncle said, ‘Joy is the opposite of running into a dagger.’ Right then, I decided I wanted to write a poem around that line. It’s a joy spending time with family: you see where you get it from. You see where your beauty derives.”
-Karisma Price

Start with your own body, the small bones of the hands moving toward the inlets of the fingers. Wanting it too much invites haste. You must love what is raw and hungered for. Think of the crab cake as the ending, as you till away at the meat, digging for errant shells and jagged edges. Always, it’s a matter of guesswork but you hold it together by the simplest of ingredients, for this is how the body learns to be generous, to forgive the flaws inherited and enjoy what lies ahead. Yet you never quite know when it happens, the moment when the lumps transcend egg and breadcrumbs, the quiver of oil in a hot pan, to become unworldly: the manifold of pleasure with the sweet ache of crab still bright on your tongue.

Over His Dead Body

of him,

milk in a years of sieved gush:

a threnody’d squawk of chickens,

of hundreds squabbled to grocers from farms;

stiffened in hells of stoves, at least,

as trundled bones on plates that lair

–– all this:

crack’d apart of eggs, babes against

affrightful skillets glee’d by grease;

nameless butchers that pummell’d

the gory steaks for abrupt of his fork

and teeth; unraveled bacon by the yard

moving its char along his tubes,

could not be held, could not leave much;

oysters could not save a thing;

nor could shrimp from plundered shallows,

neckbones, heavy pork shops,

do much –– nor could groundround

daunt; steamed up lobster,

lush’d with butter, failed completely

––the body no gravy could fill

To be morsel’d off to fat grubs

(Let my own personal feelings offend:

That he ate well enough we know

––as to what end––,

Russell Atkins

2019

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Castnet Seafood

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Castnet Seafood

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