A Gaping Jaw

In its gaping jaw,

the gray snake

holds the brindled toad,

struggling to swallow

what it cannot. The frog,

chirping, seems resigned,

front legs pressing

the snake’s slit eyes.

It is a task one part

craft, the other art.

One part heart

the other head.

One part rhythm

another writhe.

One part hiss

another tremble.

One part slither

another leap.

This hybrid species—

hunger and fight,

teeth and tongue

and song.

Father

I taste your Jack Daniel’s at night,

hear ice cubes crack against glass,

smell your pipe and leather bag—

those needles, your morphine

and scalpel, rattlesnake kit, Tromner

hammer for tapping my knees.

Your stethoscope never did listen

to me. The Jaguar you drove, swallowtail

black like the butterflies you gassed—

when I refused to—in your padlocked

workshop. Your test tubes and potions,

poisons and vials, jars and dark corners

where we hammered brass pins, lined

lepidoptera in neat Latin rows, wine,

halitosis, wives half your age, your cheap

cologne’s reek, the weed you inhaled.

You raised me, a thing to display

on your arm, Klipschorn speakers

blaring your porn, Playboys, the dance

floor in Spain, the bulls at Pamplona,

where you played you were “Papa.”

And for a moment, golden, you shone

like Florida’s flaxen panhandle sand

where we swam till that rogue wave

dragged me under, gagged me on brine,

till the copperhead sunning itself

on the riverbank struck. You glanced

over your glasses; your cackle erupted.

Father, your slick head glistened,

your sweat beading like mercury

on kitchen linoleum, like mercury

that leaked from that thermometer

you spanked me for cracking.

But I am the quicksilver

you did not catch—slippery

daughter you never could grasp.

Listening for Something as a Girl, 1970

My vigilance is visceral;

there is no freeze in me.

I am all ear-swivel

and twitch, amygdala

and head hitch, tail

switch and quick shit,

adrenaline and flinch.

I am snort and blow, twist

and bolt, stone cold to

don’t look back lathered

gallop in a second flat,

fleeing the pack, gathering.

To you, deaf to that

distant panting, blind

to their yellow-eyed

stare through spruce

and Ponderosa, no more

than mare am I—

fickle filly, wind-skittish,

grizzly-jittered and

butterfly-spooked,

hallucinating timber wolves.

But a blue moon rises

and we are there still.

It is real, father, real—

the frigid creek,

the she-wolf, starving,

gaunt, the wildfire-

blackened foothills.

Bees

For you have stol’n their buzzing…

William Shakespeare

At home she starves

for honey. Words muffled,

hum in a mouth’s hive.

At night, in bed, bees

settle on the fleshy petals

of her ears to speak. Instead

they flee. Each night a hornet

hunts and masticates each

sweet bee, piece by piece,

leaving only heads uneaten.

It creeps beneath her shirt,

crawls into the blossoms

of her skirt. Hints of

tobacco, cavendish, drifting—

stung, her tongue thickens,

anaphylactic, too fat

to speak a word.

Salamanders

It’s their scarcity that keeps me saying sacred

of the summer my brother and I would scramble

to the creek, past the tree oozing amber honey,

tossing rocks and fleeing bees, lifting leaves

and rolling rotten logs, in search of salamanders.

Deaf to the prophetic thump of hammer on lumber,

we carried them home in mason jars, I tell my son,

the ones we used for fireflies. We didn’t know

to close our eyes and kneel as my father slit

the throbbing throats, made the daily sacrifice—

severed tails twitching, dark skin marked

in caution yellow, the heads persimmon red—

and dropped the bloody bits into the cage

of baby caiman. Like leather birds, needled

beaks agape, eyes unwavering, they chirped.

Crooked Bucking Horse with Buzzing Bee and Glass of Sherry, Her Father Slurring On

To compensate for his lack of stature,

Franco sat a white cavalry mare.

His officers sat castrated bays.

An emptied Rioba. Pablo this and Pablo that—imagined

intimacy, his pontificating. She remembers the painting’s

blacks and grays, angled strokes broken into fragmented

Basque faces, crooked horse run through, writhing on

the javelin, the bull of Spain’s misaligned eyes: Guernica’s

horror she’d inhaled and drunk from for a year.

His hungover crop-touch to her napkin-covered flank, a slight

left rein-tightening, leg pressure finessed in polished leather.

An arched brow his half-halt, cueing her to choose the proper lead.

An unruly mare may need a martingale or a bit of severe wire,

twisted to bite her tongue, a tight gag rigged to stop her gallop

and staunch her noisy neighing. She spat you’re wrong

like gristle-meat. Her rack of lamb slipped from her plate

to meet the camarero’s feet. He trotted off to fetch her father’s

sherry; for desert he served them figs and cheese, sweet cream

covered up in buzzing honey still stinging like the bees.