In the back of the car

On Christmas Eve morning

Was a brown bag

Of a dozen crabs

In the front were my Dad and I

The crabs were creepy,

And crawling around in the bag

Alive and soon to be dead

Soon to experience a painful death

That involved the stove

In Nana’s kitchen

Those feisty little crabs

Put up a resistance

As we put them in the pot,

Clinging to each other in a chain

As Nana told the story of when 

A crab once pinched Grandpa D’Elia

In the eye

So he pulled off the rest of its body from the claw

And soon those struggling crabs were boiling in a pot

The last sounds they heard

Being the Italian folk music on the radio,

Our chattering about past Christmases,

And the sound of the boiling water

That killed the creepy little crabs

Once and for all

I felt bad for those little critters

But I was so hungry

And they just tasted so good

Sorry little crabs, but this is what happens

When your friends resort to violence

And leave our relatives

With puffed-up swollen eyelids

Gianluca D’Elia’s poem Medulla appeared here in December as part of Contributor Series 7: The Confessional Diary of Bone.