The crab shakes all over, hands vibrating as she backs
out of the body, her wholeness arrived, new skin grown
safely inside the old. The voiceover says body armor.
Says shield. Says mounting pressure, the crab a volcanic event.
This world has made a liability of softening. Of letting in
more than we keep out. All those husks I gathered
along the shore were not ghosts, but skins
the crab had outgrown. A delicacy, this softness.
We took the creature in her molting, her in-between.
Before the tough shell returns,
an opening.
—
Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, land-based poet and essayist with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, VIDA, Muzzle, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.
