I used to think grenades were held together by safety pins, though
their pins looked nothing like the safety pins we kept in a narrow
plastic case in the drawer beneath the linen closet, where towels
and sheets smelled of must and mothballs. There is a certain
kind of snail that is a delicacy in towns further north—nothing
like the French escargot, drowned in butter and garlic and wine.
The snails we boiled in plain salted water and ate, when they
were sold in the market, had shiny, blueblack shells spiraling
into a faint orange smudge in the center. Each had a little trap
door on one end, shut close but not close enough that you
couldn’t pry it open with a fingernail. But how to extract
the meat of the body, burrowed deep into its heated cave?
My mother and her mother before her used safety pins,
brandishing them delicately like the finest dessert spoons
in the world. Their little silver tips slid in just far enough
to snag one end of muscle, pull it close to where the mouth
could suck the whole morsel out. Safety is a body with
a place to hide in. It is so safe, like a buried secret. Safety
is the ocean depths or the belly of a ship.

You cling to it until
it deposits you in the mouth
of an alien shore.