STONED AND SERPENTINE
There are many times throughout a normal day
when the coiled serpent that took up residence in my gut in the fifth grade
stirs and tilts its pointed head up my throat, deciding
I am going to slither up and out through her esophagus,
I am going to choke her to death.
I do not blame the snake for this. I have been trying
to break free of myself for years.
Lately, I’ve been trying to smoke the snake out,
maybe asphyxiate the bastard from the inside.
At first it put her to sleep, snoring in the warmth
of my pelvic floor while I listened to Radiohead
and ate Cosmic Brownies and giggled at the
silly shapes floating across my closed eyelids.
My snake isn’t stupid, unfortunately. Two years later
and now all this does is put her in a stupor,
no longer sweetly snoring in the pit of my stomach
but rather slowly encircling my lungs, furious
that I thought I could trick her into submission.
There isn’t room for her in there. We both know it,
and we both let her stay anyways.
Sedating my snake is an expensive daily habit.
We listen to the sound of mourning doves at sunset from
my boyfriend’s untreated wooden deck, pockmarked with
piss stains and smears of ghost-gray ash. Their cooing calls
makes my snake want to hunt, she always seems starving
for something. I’ve never bothered to ask her what for,
simply kept hoping that one day she’d be satiated enough
with what little I give her to figure it out on her own.
Sky Allen, 22, Denver - USA ✯ BACK TO POETRY: OUROBOROS
“Sky Allen is a 22-year-old MFA student hailing from Denver, CO. With a passion for crafting evocative stories, she infuses their writing with a sense of place inspired by her experience as a twenty-first-century girl. A graduate of Southern Methodist University, Sky now pursues an MFA in Creative Writing on the Fiction track at Emerson College.
Currently immersed in the MFA experience, Allen finds joy in exploring the nuances of human emotion and the art of storytelling. As a prose enthusiast, her latest work, "Stoned and Serpentine," is an exploration into the lyrical realms of poetry.”