So what if the minestrone soup
was too salty, the meat chunks
stringy, this was before dental floss
and beyond caring if small brown bits
lodged between our teeth would be
visible when we laughed out loud.
And if the air smelled of rain that day,
the sand was diamond studded,
cool under a low canopy of clouds,
along a sea the exact green shade of our
favorite modeling clay, gray-green
of the frenzied dolphin pride we watched,
and we alone on that beach caught sand crabs,
scooped dozens into faded red buckets,
welcomed sea stars, hundreds upon hundreds
washed ashore by an impending Nor’easter
before the storm. The sand crabs scurried on our
wet palms, traced our life lines without
prediction, performed tricks in sand crab
circuses we made in the metal pie plates
we’d lifted from Mother’s meticulous kitchen
When we ran our fingers over their pebbled legs,
the sea stars suckled our arms
and raised fine hairs on the backs
of our tanned necks. This was
long before we came to covet their ability to renew themselves,
long before I saw them as metaphor.
This was one day of sandblasted laughter.
They simply tickled and we were there.
Abrams-Morley grew up in the heart of Princeton. Co-founder/director of Around the Block Writers’ Collaborative Liz is a professor in the MFA in Writing Program at Rosemont College. She and her husband currently live in Philadelphia.
