How You Clean a Razor Clam

The clams raise their necks weakly in the stainless steel sink, as if reaching for air or sun or the one who made them.  And when the water comes, the hottest rain, a teakettle's easy sacrifice, they stretch beyond themselves; one by one, like flowers thirsty after a long drought, they burst open, their shells no longer held tight against their breasts, their senseless shifting stilled.

You pick up a clam to clean it.

To clean: to remove impurities, to expunge, to liberate the imperfect, to decontaminate.  The act, in a familiar context: wet strings of cloth flopping across a floor in undulating spasms with the push-pull of a mop handle; the sturdy bristles of a broom whispering and shouting in turns across a wooden floor; a rag, heavy with the bitter scent of bleach, shining a porcelain commode; feathers flitting across the homes of dust bunnies and spiders, destroying gray constellations and webs, leaving nothing for fingerprints to stamp.

You pick up a pair of sharp scissors.

Scissors: tool for subtraction, division, revision.  Device for taking what was too much and cutting it down to size.

You snip the tip of the neck.  There is truth in the saying, if you stick your neck out.  It falls with a plop, like fagioloni loosed from a pot.

You clip along the frilly zipper, the simple seam so easily undone, the insides falling open like the pages of a book that was never meant to be read, or at least, that never hoped to be.  You poke the tip of your scissors into the tiny hole at the base of the neck and pump your thumb until the second chamber reveals its lot.  Turn on the tap, let the clear, cool water whisk away the gray rivulets of sand, think about shaving, how stubble mixes with the frothy cream and rushes down your skin into the drain.

Now, to remove the fine, olive-colored fringe circling the digging flap at the clam's center.  How light it is, like the hem of a woman's summer dress.  You slip the scissors along the gills, scrape away that delicate pleat and remind yourself that everything must eat.

Finally, you arrive at the large, dark marble on the other side.  It shimmers wildly, like an eye or the heart of a violet caught in a thunderstorm.  You don't want to--but you know that this black bulge, the  thing so important to the clam's existence that it lay shrouded behind calcified walls and clenched muscle--has to come out for all the other excisions to matter.  You plunge the scissors in and watch the world spill out.

One last rinse, and the clam is a shell of its former self.  You touch its white gleam, and all the places in you that once held shadow and doubt sparkle with the memory of mops pushed through them, scissors cutting through that which no longer became you.

Your Shape

Though I like being alone,
I am lonely at night.

When the rains come,
I fall asleep with wet cheeks
and touch myself
in the middle of a dream
about withering roses
and the kind of cold
only glaciers know.

Years pass.

In the morning
my hand is as much memory
as your shape,
the rose-tinged curves of your cheeks.