The child sleeps on a bed of snakes:
spotted,
striped, neon pink, a dense vivarium
of soft things with their flickering, felted
tongues.
Some wag with a spliff between his yellowed
teeth
wanders into the darkened room, his inscrutable
jokes
lost on the prepubescent child, still acrid to
the nose,
and even the leathery skins prickle and grow
hot.
They surround those skinny limbs, looped head to
tail,
making the sign for infinity, encircling fetid
night;
the snakes raise their flattened skulls and
begin to stir.
Below deck, shot glasses clink, and a woman’s
screech
is a seagull preying on strange worms and
tortuous forms
emerging dark as some mythology or cast back by
the sea.
The child, uneasy, shucks off the flowered
quilt, limp sail
on becalmed night ship. Thirsty, she drinks from
rusted taps,
and you would think her glad to lie above the
sea, the shore
where city children come by rail to grow so
nicely brown.
But that strange wind mounts like fire from the
beach,
scorches screens, tickling the tongues of
snakes.
It smells, it reeks, this evening breeze, of
nothing else but skin.
From the peeling deck comes the crunch of heels
on sand,
sprayed by that concupiscent breeze, blinding
dilate eyes.
The child toes boards down the papered hall,
pricking ears.
See green vines wriggle into myriad forms, like
nothing
so much as a nest of snakes. Rows of yellow
teeth shine.
On a table, there is beach plum in its crackled
vase,
smelling sweet enough as offering for human or
for snake.
Mornings, the mothers spread warm lotion on
their legs,
toss spent cigarettes onto sand. Children
freckle and burn.
There are the sandwiches, egg and cheese, and
buckets
of damp grit and the view of fathers treading
out to sea
so that only pinheads bobble in the swell of
cresting waves.
The children bury their willing victims deep in
the sand,
sunny schadenfreude on full display, the
mothers smiling,
beach umbrellas fully spread against the heat of
the day,
full rigged ships sailing so tantalizingly close
to the eye.
Folded on her mother’s crooked knee, the child
finds the arc
in the history of sand, tracing faint
undulations of the snakes.
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