Calamari

Remember the time mom said fuck when we were in the car and we were scared even though we whispered the word back and forth plenty of times before
behind her back listening to rap music and telling each other to go fuck a horse?
Well, we didn’t understand.

It was like ordering from the adult menu even though we had no idea what calamari was but it sounded cool and we spit it out on the restaurant floor as soon as mom told us it was squid.

But when mom said fuck in the car we could see that squid caught in green algae-coated ropes hanging below the large fishing boat
and the short silence after she spoke was a knife cutting all the porous tentacles in
bite-sizes to be dipped into batter

Three hundred and seventy five degrees frying oil as
our 1992 Chevy Camaro collided into the Astro van ahead of us