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Poetry by
Ken Cenicola and Jessy Randall

A Sky About to Rain by Mario Sánchez Nevado
A Sky About to Rain by Mario Sánchez Nevado


Lobster


Giggling in the grocery store, gnawing at your crops.

Will something grow in me if I eat the watermelon seeds?
My orange fingers give me away.
It’s like eating delicious plastic.

After so many years, I tried a new thing with you.
You tease me with your cloud.
You make my teeth hurt.

I just want to do it the normal way.
This is not the life I planned for myself.

It tastes like embarrassment.

I trick myself into enjoying the lack of you.
She had confusion for a name.
It feels kinky to drink it.

Your car reeked of it for weeks.
You deplete me. Your shape fools me.

I tear you apart like a lobster,
like I’d tear apart a lobster,
like a lobster tearing something apart,
like a lobster tearing another lobster apart,
like a lobster tearing me apart.

There are songs about you, but it’s difficult to sing them when you are
in my mouth.




We wrote this poem in two stages. First, we sent the names of foods to each other by email, writing a short response to each food. (We have also done this with names of songs, movies, books, and games.) Only after receiving the other person’s response to a food could we write our own response. We ended up with a long list of foods and responses, perhaps four pages long. We then re-ordered selected responses into “Lobster.” It was a long, time-consuming way to make a poem, but we didn’t mind because each step was fun and interesting.