Carapace

by Carson Lee

Honorable Mention, 2019 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize
selected by Tarfia Faizullah

My mother will tell me
incredible things when no one else
is listening, how as a child
she killed her brother’s goldfish,
bathing it in soap & sunlight

to clean it, because she wanted
to do a nice thing & how ever since
her daughters left, she awakes unable
to breathe most mornings, because
in dreams her children are dying—

like that night in New York,
holiday lights & fogged glass,
over a boiled lobster too red
& reflecting against her cheekbones,
when she said she almost left

my father for another man,
twenty years ago, after he fought
a cab driver on the road, all of this
told as if an anecdote to a friend.
& I know why she stayed,

& I have done terrible things
in the name of love, too,

but all I could manage, staring down
at the brittle shell, was to break
open the animal’s claw, pull out the soft
white flesh & say, my lover is good to me
& is worth salvaging, despite the way
my mother nods with disbelief.

Carson Lee is a South Korean poet based in Philadelphia. Her words have appeared in Apeiron Review, Bridge Eight, bedfellows, and elsewhere. At NYU, she was the recipient of the 2018 Judith Lobel Arkin Poetry Prize sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She is currently getting her MFA in creative writing and teaching undergraduate writing composition at Rutgers University-Camden. You can find her @thecarsonage on Twitter.