The girls may have been 4 and 7; their mamie was in town,<\/p>\n
winter, Christmas Eve, 2003.<\/p>\n
We had live lobsters swimming in a pot most of the day.<\/p>\n
Jordyn watched the claws open and close slowly.<\/p>\n
“What does a lobster eat?”<\/p>\n
I had to look it up.<\/p>\n
And when 7 o’clock rolled, my mother in law filled a great big pot with water,<\/p>\n
turned up the flame high, and salted the water.<\/p>\n
I kept the children entertained with decorating dessert.<\/p>\n
At lightening speed, before we could recover, she tosses the lobsters in,<\/p>\n
quickly takes them out and slams them onto a platter, stabs them<\/p>\n
down the middle, with a butcher’s knife, one, two, three, four,<\/p>\n
crack, split, crack, split, crack, split, crack split, her hair tossed back.<\/p>\n
I turned my head to look at them, their little mouths agape, eyes<\/p>\n
wide open in disbelief and dismay, stilled by the violence<\/p>\n
they had never seen before; a Christmas they always remember.<\/p>\n
Add a few more dollars to the therapy jar–and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The girls may have been 4 and 7; their mamie was in town, winter, Christmas Eve, 2003. We had live lobsters swimming in a pot most of the day. Jordyn watched the claws open and close slowly. “What does a lobster eat?” I had to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":196,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,441],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","category-poetry-prompt-responses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73884,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73781\/revisions\/73884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}