Anne Stevenson
Oysters
The fat man laughed because
the restaurant told him to,
because the oysters that slipped
at atrocious expense
through his pinguid lips
were poisonous,
and the hock at his elbow
hardly less,
and the lady, too,
so svelte in the crypt
of her basilisk dress
was dangerous
beyond the laughable.
Wasn’t that diamond
clipped
at her cleavage
an oyster between
white dunes on a beach,
growing luscious on sewage’s
steamy tureen
of barely detectable
radioactive garbage?
Page(s) 18
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