PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

A fish fry is a fish fry is a fish fry. One idenear Kingston, on lake Ontario, Canadian, was of small mouth bass we caught, included a boiled onion, delicious; and a few wasps cutting-and-carrying little nuggets of their own from the raw meat on the pre-cooking platter; presumably to the nest, where they’re anticipated by hovering others who heard the news. Never would’ve thought that, but there it was...still, a fish fry’s a fish fry.

A crab boil has it’s own flavor. A Chesapeake Bay one had a generation of siblings (and some others, like myself) retrieving traps from the water, grabbing them with long tongs, boiling them with spices, making crab cakes from the pickings, etc. Then setting off a boatload of fireworks.

A crawfish boil is unique. At least one of them. I think of Louisiana in general, New Orleans in particular. They all share a pervasion of scent, an invisible cloak of note. Invisible except they’re hard to miss. This one was on a corner of Tchoupitoulas, there’s a stop sign on the corner. I got a beer and leaned on the signpost. To my left was a railed-off parking space or so, open to the sidewalk. The boiling pot, large by any standard, was on a butane-burner the size of a soccer ball. Bags of crawfish on one side, bins of cooked ones on the other, sold by the pound. To my right was a table of 5 or 6 young women, having drinks and talking.

Innocently, I leaned against the post, watched the sky, and looked for what weather was or wasn’t coming. The post was unforgiving. So was the air.

The girls at the table were talking, go figure. Somehow, I fazed into the topic of conversation, their first time, and I don’t mean their first crawfish boil.

A crawfish tail is pulled from the body, and once peeled, the nub of meat is eaten; then one does something unusual, place the open end of the cephelothorax against your lips and ‘snap-breathe’ in. The expression is ‘Eat the tail, suck the head’; sucking the head re-introduces the spices to the meat. A tail-in-cheek expression. Makes my mouth water just writing about it.

I didn’t hear the introduction, but the first girl I heard said something along the lines of:

‘I was mad, I felt he owed me.’

Another:

‘I liked it, getting it started, I mean. I wanted to do it more.’ I confess liking that one.

Another:

‘I was sad. I cried.’

Another:

‘I thought: “…well, that’s over with…”’ She must’ve felt late.

The round made, there was a pause, then they all laughed at once, a pleasant laugh. I almost laughed with them, but thought it would be in bad taste. Eat the tail, suck the head. Bad taste expression, good tasting technique. But it doesn’t count. It has to be serious penetration. And it hurts; the girls, not the boys.

A curious waft of thought came to me. My first was a virgin herself, the act was an affirmation for both of us. We were equally impacted emotionally, and it was wonderfully appropriate. We were together long enough to be serious with the families, then she went away for 2 years (to Spain, not the next suburb), then we tried again for 2 years, then it was me that ahd to go see the woorld and fuck other women. All things being equal, it may have been better to stick with it and skip (the balance of) the other sex. She once asked:

‘Did you know we were going to do it when we went in there?’
‘No.’ And I didn’t, I thought we would lay in bed, make out, stick our hands in each oithers clothes, then snuggle til she had to go home. It was roughly midnight in a quiet house, we were routinely left alone by the siblings and parents to be alone in the den. Next to the bedroom. It took a long time if you know what I mean; in retrospect, I wanted it to be good for her, and basically was worried about her. Probably makes me an innocent sexual sadist in somebody’s book. Or a te. Some time later, I asked:

‘Did it hurt…?’ Her answer: ‘YES!…’

After, she had to go home or…you guessed it…she’d get in trouble. I took her home, kissed her front door (on the lips, not that front door), and went home. There was the time, shortly after, wherein we got carried away in her (family’s) laundryroom, she on the washing machine, me lifting up and in, both of us on the laundryroom floor, and that one didn’t take long at all. We scrambled our pelvic areas back into our clothes, this in the midst of a big enough family’s house on a busy enough Saturday morning. She said:

‘That was stupid…’
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ What she meant was that we could’ve easily had her family, my family, and all other comers, make an embarrassing & arduous event out of an explosion of primal passion.

What I meant was that it was close…me pulling out yet still taking a squirt in there. Lucky, the rest were so powerful, searching, and a mess. So that’s (almost) how we all got here. In my mind, that was the first one.