Snake threnody, remix

by Thomasin LaMay

                       
I wonder how to shed my skin,
all of it, like the snake who
spirals, blind and naked, 
a bloody puddle on the porch.
This to grow, become,
intransitive. 
 
She survives by peeling off
her backstory.

I wonder if she spits anger
at perpetrators - the apple
or surely Adam – who couldn’t
speak in sentences, so
made himself up - myth,
transitive.

I would tell him
pusillanimity is dust.

I decide this: to slide
off the biblical page,
quit the finale and flirt
with the snake. The garden
lush, our skins molt
sun to gold, and then

we fall in love. 

In the remix, I tell them
I am who I am.


* * * * *

Thomasin LaMay is a writer, singer and teacher. She’s taught music and women/gender studies at Goucher College, Baltimore and currently works with high school kids/women/victims of trauma at Penn North. Her poems have most recently appeared in Thimble Literary Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, and Yellow Arrow Journal. She lives in Baltimore city with about 500 books and plants, a dog, two cats and for fun she plays drums.