A Dirge Melody: Don’t Let the Humans Know We Contain Souls
by Elizabeth Upshur
published in Mistake House (2017)
If you want the pearl
the oyster growled as a lioness
you will have to pry me from this rock
wrest my shell jaws open
cut my living muscle self apart.
Can you do that?
They can. They do. They polish, bleach, buff, label the pearl grade C light luster, barely usable.
No one asks the dead why are you dead, when piously wearing their flesh. For a pearl: the gravel irritating my soft heart I coated in substance of my shell.
A man with nimble fingers nimble brain chains the pearls creates a jolie-laide necklace of 113 other variants.
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