{Crab in a Polystyrene Crate}... a month of poetry...

You are spiking rocks green-fed
in flaking ice-bed so far from
your tepid rock-pool mouth
with its tender fringe of algae.

Crab in a polystyrene crate,
your eyes are still so impossibly small,
but does your side coded disc-brain, ridged,
remember minnow crushing Sundays,

your sisters' hands like stinging orchids
as they were lifted in the swash?
Discs on a dead sailor's femur,
humpbacked quicksteps.

Dead crab in a polystyrene crate,
for sale on the market stall -
do the eels beside you sometimes writhe
through their rubber death damp?

Ask you why you didn't try harder
to snap the ropes,
un-net the nets?

Amy Blakemore