Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “A Handful of Hermit Crabs” by Sarah Wolfson.

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A Handful of Hermit Crabs

By Sarah Wolfson

And now the internet has found a hermit crab housed in a blue-eyed doll’s head

separated from whatever other parts

had made her vaguely human. Her globed crown now crawls on eight sturdy legs,

a grotesque sideshow set nowhere

in particular except in front of us. It’s snow crab season in Quebec, also time

for fiddleheads, asparagus.

You know the season. The short one reserved for bright, sweet emerging things.

Click and her head will crawl again

on ten articulated legs. You might be tempted to think that’s it

for hermit crabs this week: enough

exposure, enough strangeness for one species but over in another corner

of this nowhereness, a wrinkled hand

folds and unfolds on loop to show dozens of miniature hermit crabs, a proper handful:

fingers clenched to bursting

as if with bird seed. Each time they open, a swarm of misshapen Easter eggs clambers

over all the other small, hard ersatz-bodies,

some green, some blue, some the many variegated shades of soil. Most are fast,

but even the apparently dead or dormant

eventually move, too — outward and away and off the edge of everything,

climbing over whatever is necessary

on tiny twitching feather-legs. All at once a wonder and a horror and your average

case of standing by

to watch a stranger’s hand let water or other miracles slip through it.

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Copyright © Sarah Wolfson

Previously published in Sporklet.

Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in The Walrus, Geist, The Fiddlehead, Arc, Prairie Fire, The Yale Review, AGNI, Grain, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal, where she teaches at McGill University.

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