There’s a certain way to do it,
something you learned, if you’re lucky,
as a child on the coast
and now you know
to grab the pink thighs
of slight legs
in order to rip off the shell,
to take out that black strip of stomach that might offend someone
having picked a sharp knife, of course,
for fast work but never
one of those special tools that serves
only one purpose
before cooking up the whole mess—so fast there’s no time to tell
everyone please come to the table—and translucence turns
opaque.