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Serpentarium
She can fit a thirty-foot giant
into one sheet of A4,
pack pythons
into her sketchbook,
squeezing their loops
in tight breeding-balls, until
the man comes with his forked stick
and pins her head down.
She must have been drawing
too fast, her tail in her mouth
like Ouroboros – that’s
what they call her when
she goes crazy. Years ago
they sewed up
her mouth. Now,
a nurse comes to unstitch her.
He nails her head on a hook,
but that’s just the beginning, she
knows it gets worse.
She thinks if she can draw
enough snakes she’ll get
used to it, stop her eyes blinking
when he shoves the hose
down her throat, makes the room tilt,
water poured into her stomach,
her jaws unhinged. Three of them
holding her down
to strap her arms to her chest,
while she threshes against the memory –
always the same memory
of the reptile she met that day
on the Petit Pont,
who insisted they go dancing,
then escorted her to the hotel
and seized her in his coils,
who thrust his hemipenis
into every orifice,
murmuring how snake sex
can take a whole night.
Every scratch from his mating spur
made her want to rip her skin off.
Even when someone came in
he kept going,
laughing at her.
Years, his eggs have stayed inside her,
ready to hatch in this sketchpad:
cobras, cascabels, emerald
tree boas, harlequins.
She strokes the retic –
her hog-swallower.
She fills in the last cross-hatch
on his snout, can feel the skin
loosening round his mouth,
ready for the moult.
She waits for lights-out,
smudges carefully with the eraser,
easing his skin like a dress
pulled over a girl’s head,
her own face empty
on the pillow beside her,
the pencil of herself
blunt, her work done.
Wedding Petticoat
Her dress is lace, but her underskirt
is a crinoline of rose stems.
He calls her his garden
because birds perch
on the cage of hoops,
hopping between the thorns.
All day they weave her
a fabric of song.
All night he hacks his way through.
Honeymoon
There were seven of me then –
seven horses threshing
in the barn of my head.
They tore down my face, legs
flailing, anywhere but inside
where they could smell fire.
They drove across the bed
that closed around them,
winter bit on their manes.
Michel laughed as they stiffened.
How narrow the bed was,
a river I had to wade through.
I was an empty stable, looking
up through icicles. But I
remember my horses, jaws open
wide as if ice had stopped them
mid-neigh, their eyes staring,
heads twisted out of the sheets
and their bodies doing
that deep-frozen swim.
Miscarriage
He gives her gin then saffron.
In the toilet she gives birth to a boy.
Afterwards she needs a glass dome
to lie inside, a red balloon tied to her thigh.
The doctor calls it the afterbirth
but she knows it’s a balloon
because she can hear it squeak
and besides, her husband bursts it,
then packs her off to work.
Poetic Voices
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