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June 19, 2025

The Major Claw

We crabs glove ourselves in one or another finger-hole by which a hand might grip and heave the globe up whole. The Gulf is scintillant, played by the sun with a steely pick: what sounds to you like a roar resolves at our scale into music. Ahead of your steps our wordless mass withdraws leading with the elbows of our major claws. A grove of palms scraping their scant shade together rasps each strand of wind raveled into weather. We’d either be weavers ourselves, or pluck steel strings. Your ears at this scale could pick out what the sea sings. There are no Crusoes among us who pour en masse into the listening sand over the drowned beach grass. Rome burns, but we take our grain of salt in pinches. We’ve adapted over aeons to avalanche by inches.

Ange Mlinko’s new collection, Foxglovewise, is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Magazine, Poetry, July-August 2025

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