peeling shrimp because my mind is a crustacean

elise tao

and because i’m paying homage to the women before me who were beaten with the flat part of a

knife and flipped over in a butcher shop. imagine yourself splitting into six segments from the

breasts down, having a set of legs to walk and another to swim. no creature should have both.

imagine omnivores using multiple pinchers to rip your translucent shell from your body. your

skin isn’t shelter, it’s bait. gray & unconscious, uncoiling into bodily flush when boiled. once

we’re opaque, they’ll finally dispose of us: simple homicides, garnished with cilantro. our

corpses will overhear drunks laying their hands on thighs that have turned away and we will

be helpless, hanging from cocktail glasses like idiots. we pity the bycatch, but is idolatry any better?

they think we’re like mermaids. separate our heads from our tails, and our conscience remains

the same. we sauteed on the cast iron, caressed by spatulas used against high-tempered husbands,

awaiting our perfect domestic deaths. we float, regurgitating all we’ve ever done for others

while we are hooded by silver diamonds. how selfish of us! shying from martyring our life-vessels,

squirming incoherently on ceramic. if i spear your belly in half and let it scorch on my tongue,

i am sorry. if i cannibalize, i hope to be spared. my sisters, i worship the meat of our colonizers.

Elise Tao is a junior at the Academy of the Holy Angels and is the founder of the multimedia teen magazine Synthesis Publications. Her work has previously been published in The Apprentice Writer and Sole Magazine. She is the recipient of an Anthony Quinn Foundation Literary Arts Scholarship and has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, YoungArts, Hollins University, Bennington College, Rider University, and Susquehanna University. She has attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. When she is not poem-ing, she can be found collecting Lana Del Rey vinyls and catching the Sunday matinee.