Robert McDonald
Robert McDonald is a queer poet living in Chicago, where he works at an independent bookstore. His work has been published in a wide variety of journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Sentence, Pank, and Columbia Poetry Review, among others.
Oysters
I always say please,
just hand
my body over
to the fire, but it’s peaceful, somehow, to picture
instead being cast
into the sea, to know
the little white
ghost crabs will grab and scissor
and pluck
at our meat; even our bones
will become
a home and a meal for snails. If I can
be reborn let me be
reborn
as a hundred
new shells
for the oysters, each mollusk
a book, able to open and close
its own rough cover,
let’s be the containment
for a library of tongues,
and one shining pearl, that
will be you,
turned over and over, smooth
pebble in the chamber
of my spit-slick
mouth.
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Image by Vika Glitter from Pexels
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