Oyster World
You massacred those oysters
when we were girls,
wrenched them from the river mud
despite my pleas that oysters can feel pain,
that I could feel their suffering
as you beat them with a blunt rock
until nothing but iridescent black shards
littered the limestone.
You said they were invasive,
you said they were pests,
words plucked from your mother’s lips
about the new girls in our school,
girls from the city
who didn’t go to bible study
but taught lessons on french
kissing girls in the cafeteria.
I asked our science teacher
if the oysters were invasive
and she said not to our river.
I asked a new girl to lunch
and I didn’t understand
how she could be invasive
when her tongue was the first
that spoke a language I understood.
You told your mom what you saw
me do during lunch
and she told you we couldn’t
play together anymore.
I’d still go to the river, hoping to run into you,
hoping I could grow your mind
past the limits of our watershed,
but all I ever found were piles of crushed oysters,
drying in the sun, burning shadows
onto the limestone.
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(Photo: Chris Cooper/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- Oyster World by Cayla Garman - May 22, 2025