Living Fossils

by L. M. Guay

Did you know, said a boy at the Coney Island touch tank,

if you step on a horseshoe crab, you can’t get AIDS.

 

Over 500,000 horseshoe crabs are taken and bled each year.

The color of lost worlds is raspberry freeze pop, antiviral blue. 

 

That summer I let the sea plaster me into a new body,

swam fully clothed, hid my girlhood in a suit of brine. 

 

That summer my aunt was gone to Florida,

where the woman who wasn’t her roommate would die.

 

And the city ran hot and bothered, like a vein

seething with ghosts it cannot return.

 

Back then I didn’t know how to want the things I wanted,

only to mouth the narrow breeze as she drifted in and fled.

 

Back then I stretched out on the sand like a bared throat.

Flipped on its back, a horseshoe crab will not survive alone.

 

What part of a living fossil is the part that lives?

If I close my eyes I see the boardwalk as it once was,

 

the air ceaseless and the oranges not yet bruised,

and all up and down the shadow of stomping feet.