Because in her neck of Florida, she wasn’t raised
on tornado drills or water moccasins
but instead on hurricane precaution
and how to kill
coral snakes.
In some sense,
because she’d been waiting forever to spy
those thick-banded stripes of coral, yellow,
black, the slideshows in elementary school,
the legends.
Because it was dark,
a late dinner charring on the grill,
and she’d gone to check
if the blood had gone
out of the burgers and
because
beneath the faint moon
a flash of slick midnight skin slithered
in the garage’s shadow, shy,
she snatched whatever
was nearest—
wasp spray—
aimed and drained the can,
the snake stunned
into eerie stillness, and
with the shovel held high, she severed
its head.
And only then,
her heart rate and breathing uncoiling,
the stripes revealed not yellow but white,
the head not black but scarlet,
and she shook
from that
other poison that blinds
in single, certain sight—
to see what she wanted to see,
dead set
on being right.
For a creek, I had the drainage ditch / dug behind the row of streets. In it: / Mtn Dew bottles half full of piss, party / balloons, tadpoles and toads, splinters / of fish.
In water cobalt-blue a sea star melts, / its five rays torn away to join the silt’s / suspension, sand, and clay, / a spent core all that’s left. . . .
