By Ahrend Torrey
In Louisiana, we don’t eat lobster. But on this day, in keeping with the tradition we always had with our friends, we prepared it, not for three, but four, though there are only three of us now: Patrick, Jonathan, and me. And after pouring the lemon spiced Zatarain’s, after placing the broken halves of corn into the boiling pot, after dropping the pearl onions: purple, white, and yellow, we closed our eyes, a brief moment, then opened them, to drop headfirst, each lobster—oh, how they folded into their selves—and after making our plates at the patio table, after pouring the cold wine in each glass, we took Laura’s lobster, placed on its own plate in memory of her: Patrick separated the claw from its body. I separated the other. Jonathan took the tale. And as we cracked the lobster in the golden rays of sunlight, as I felt the warm flesh fall into my body, I thought: at this very moment we are one with the earth, the painful earth—where is our sweet Laura?—oh, the beautiful earth.
Ahrend Torrey enjoys exploring nature in southern Louisiana where he lives with his husband, Jonathan, their two rat terriers Dichter and Dova, and Purl their cat. He is the author of Bird City, American Eye published by Pinyon Publishing (Montrose, CO) in 2022, and Small Blue Harbor published by the Poetry Box Select imprint (Portland, OR) in 2019. His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), among others. He earned his MA and MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press.
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