Making a Meal of it
Flinty incision
The skinning knife, white as a wing
Gestures a bending length, cuffs
the stricken head to dirt
The snake become a carcass, a swan
neck, a short rope. Innards fingered out
Flesh left pink as palms of hands
but softer and coated in spittle
Cauterized by indifferent light, meat still
moving in the enamel bowl. The cooking
fire hisses in spinifex as flies arrive
to blacken the table
Somewhere in the clumped guts
a heart with no fear left in it
Snake Skin, Roe Swamp
Shedding skin of a snake, will
loosen first at the lips, retract
backward over bluing eyes
dull crown, those sorcerous jaws
Resistance is needed, seeking
friction of rock, chafe of grass
scour and scrub of brown balga
it braces its body and slides out
Slipped fishnet of bubble wrap
mingled with a streaky mandala
of divested paperbark, becomes
my discovery, being its past
I tease open a brittle end, puzzle
my arm inside, until it is sheathed
to the elbow, ghost eyes puckering
my skin. My pulse, its unsealed centre
Vestiture of rain spittle in my hair
A cool trickle slides inside my collar
I tear the delicate mesh pulling it off
in what becomes a deluge
God of fragmentation, refusing
to keep things whole, coming
to me later. Showing again that
repetition might simply be
a lack of attention to detail
Locus
I was carelessly concealed
belly down on granite, fingers
untangling the slow creek
where it pooled and emptied out
when a shadow loosened itself
into an inky rivering of sheen
and black body
With no one to share the surprise
I closed my eyes and opened them
to find it, mouth to brown surface
swallowing silently, all thirst
and quench
Inexplicable how I wanted to be
that water, touched and soundless
Snake enters the pool, carries her
head above the river’s identical
remake of its likeness. A double
helix of ripples streaming behind
-Amanda Joy
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‘Making a Meal of it’, ‘Snake Skin, Roe Swamp’ and ‘Locus’ are published in Amanda Joy’s collection of poetry, Snake Like Charms (UWAP, 2017). They have been republished in Rochford Street Review with the permission of the author.
For more snake inspired poems: ‘Hey Kekulé’, ‘Crunching the Numbers’ and ‘Cohabitation 2’ by Liana Joy Christensen
Amanda Joy was born and raised in the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. Her first full-length book, Snake Like Charms, is part of the UWAP Poetry series. Her poem ‘Tailings’ won the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She is the author of two chapbooks, Not Enough to Fold and Orchid Poems.
Rochford Street Review 