Child in Grey III

I remember the first time I fell in love with a diamond-

back rattlesnake. I was fifteen, with thick-eye-brows,

and high.

He was big and foreign, his pattern blended

in with the bark of the tree, he lay so

lackadaisically.


And in the brisk, dark sunlight,
burns to my black hair,
in the loneliness owned only
by backyards in the country,

who would have left me?


Ruins in the green grass
where I killed a baby for the first time.

He never stood upright,
a sliver of color-life
against chop-chop grass.
My father warned:
"His mother is probably around here somewhere..."

He was small enough to have slid through
the already-bitten leaves inside of my chest,

and in my yellow,
maple-leaf heart,
with all of its tiny murmurs,
he would have stood out there too.

he would have entered and left
like all men,
in all their likelihood,

longing for blood-rushed liberation,

and a thrust thrust thrust.