poem: lament for a serpent

[prismaticbleed]

as a child I believed that if I whirled like a dervish in my mothers room
beneath the single golden light above
(the rug a soft sky beneath my now-taloned feet)
I, too, would become a dragon

in the second grade, I stayed up until the sun sank deep
writing a report on gulper eels
their whip-snap shapes, their abyssal mouths
their bodies that glowed like death

my classmates knew better than to follow fairy fire
and their eyes beheld no beauty in the murk
but i loved you, my cherished ugly thing,
loved your grotesque elegance and alien fragility
all eyes and teeth and sea-black guts.

i returned to my desk with my own chest about to implode
from the terrible pressure of this weightless atmosphere
this bereavement of concern,
yanking me up from the depths of feeling
to lie, writhing and burst-helpless,
on their sterilized shores.

i swore i would never let that happen to you again.

I clutched snakes and wyverns to my heart
teaching them to sing up and down my spine
even as their bodies burned in our backyard
for working a magic we didn’t understand

we lived in a garden and they called you a devil
despite the silence of your earthbound meanderings
innocent pavement undulations seeking flowered green
every stone heralding imminent tomb
every tree shadowing a cross
the sun blazing bronze upon the tools of men

the plowshares had turned into swords

to this day, I cannot touch a garden rake
without seeing how it tore into your stomach
spilling ichor across the chalkdust pavement

I planted an apple tree above your ashes
with the same shovel that tasted your skull

I wept.



did you glow, in the dark? did I?
which of us ate the other?
whose claws are these in my heart?
and whose blood is this in my mouth?


...