Meat Cove, Cape Breton

Up at four, and out to load the traps onto the boat. What I pulled up

I did not always save. The hair of my arms bristled out in the cold.

In an earlier evolution, this would have made me seem larger, less

vulnerable to attack. The traps came up clicking, lobsters brown

and mottled with little eyes that had no whites to roll in, just wet nubs

that came up out of their armor, under their horns. The skeletons worn

outside, everything meaty inside. I held the claws away from me,

used the state gauge to measure the rear of the eye socket parallel

to the center body shell, threw back in anything measuring over

five inches, eye to tail top. I checked under the tails for eggs, dropped

the mothers back in. No one to get their fingers or forks into them yet.

It’s a freefall to the bottom. This is how we train them to trust the traps.

KC Trommer

Used by permission of the poet

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