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Snakemark

by Wendy Holboro

The truth stretches and snaps
in two, truth retches into
pans, daps fill with dust
as they must on roads
that pan out until they,
too, snap like an angry
turtle hurtling to an exit
on a stitched and tapestried
highway where time conflates memories
constricts and compresses — and like
the boa constrictor on walls
of my dreams that cling
with those strong lizard-cup suckers —
is taken down, cooked, cayman-wrinkled,
shaken with salt and balsamic,
tough as basalt I discovered
in the Western Black Desert.
Cayenne sprinkled. Seedy. Seeded with
chia seeds black and hard
as obsidian, turning to mush
in my mouth.

I ingest you like biting the memories,
the tang of your bitterness
the obsessiveness gone in the
act of eating and ecdysis,
so
I slough the taste
from my lips, occlude the
odium from my silted life.


Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Holboro

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