Mollusk

n : an invertebrate animal having a soft body and hard shell.

In Latin, the word molluscus was used as a noun to mean a soft thing like thin-shelled nuts or a fungus that grew from maple trees. Molluscus leads to mollusk, mollify, meal, mill, and molar.

She grew up washing and eating fresh-water mollusks,

collecting the kind that tickled her father's toes

when he fished for trout or soft-shelled crab.

His pole dangled like the cigarette between his lips,

then flicked once every few minutes. Between cigarettes

he picked between his molars with a twig.

In the cool humid air of first light she took the pickup

without asking and joined the Marines.

The recruiting officers had been impressed

by her endurance and strength. Calling softly

to her in the barracks, her comrades mollified her fears

with the hard shells of their palms. She bit down

and broke a rotten tooth, picked cotton from her mouth

like a field hand. Imprisoned in her own way

to the cot and the desert and the meal she received,

she dreamed that night of the clanking sound

her movement would make as she slid the bars shut.

The screams of women were the screams of men

as she forced a whore at gunpoint to remove blood-spotted panties

and hang them from a prisoner's cock; men's screams

seeming from across the barracks to be women's high-pitched shrieks

as she ordered her German shepherd to bare his teeth and growl

at this same prisoner just as he awoke in his cell,

so that he would defecate and learn to regret it.

her father's sunken cheeks, five o'clock shadow, cigarette,

even fishing pole projected like a movie onto

the similar face and body of this prisoner. Revenge is pointless,

but so is complicity, and so is believing in anything

but yourself. Don't pray to Allah or Mother Mary to redeem you;

you're only a worthless piece of shit; aren't we all sinners.

She remembered wrong and right only as a distant

notion, like the tune of a lullaby she kind of recalled

her mother humming to soothe her after a nightmare.

As a child, everything was simple - either fair or unfair,

good or bad. In the morning she took the school bus

and in the evening she played checkers and went to bed.