Razor Clams
I P Boltt
Low tide.
You are teaching me how
to hunt couteaux.
Crab-like,
keeping the sea on our side,
our right ears
roar
(the left stay silent as shells).
Il faut trouver leurs trous,
you say, and we need eyes sharp
as knives to scan the
expanse, its firm waves
strewn
sea petals and periwinkles,
pressed under brine.
Une table chez grandmère.
The vast, sky-shone pane
seeps into shoes.
A hole not large enough
to fit a finger through;
We know you’re in there!
We have something for you.
A mean trick.
And I, accomplice,
fixated, bated,
quietly complice.
I watch you slip the cellar
from your pocket, pour
salt into the wound.
I cannot look.
Cannot not look.
As though we had knocked,
a creature answered.
A tender thing, with a
new-born look. Raw.
A worm, un doigt, a pallid
phallus reared.
Blind.
Grotesque.
Frank Herbertesque.
A faceless, queasy thing,
un monstre, Leviathan
a sick little fuck.
It had hoped to see the tide.
Surprise!
No such luck.
I watch you seize it
grip it tightly
wrench it from its bed;
the poor appendage
stretches
as you pull,
pull,
and my eyes
shut like
clams.
I turn to the sea;
I daren’t turn back,
lest I am salted too.
Still I do –
though I feel witness to a
kind of crime –
to see you there,
red-handed.
Holding a knife.
~
I P Boltt was born in London to an Irish mother and a white Zimbabwean father. She grew up on a diet of travel sickness, sibling rivalry, mosquito tablets, library books, and marmite on toast. She studied English Literature, Mandarin, French and History of Art at Durham University. Afterwards, she fled to Brittany to be with her French lover, where she worked as a freelance translator, a nanny to three Indonesian children and a waitress in an Irish pub. She currently resides on a goat farm in the Cantal mountains, working in the local flora and fauna museum. Her downfall is her kindheartedness; her strength is in her inability to make up her mind.
Christian Bossu-Picat is a French photographer who has been living in Mauritius since 1986. He has published work on the Indian Ocean region for the European Union and the Commission de L’Océan Indien (COI) for tourist and artisanal advertising uses.
Aside from working as hotel photographer across the Indian Ocean Islands (Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion Island and the Maldives), he also engages in aerial photography and publishes books on tourism and local gastronomy.
Christian is a winner of the ‘Fondation Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet pour la Vocation’.
