Baby Black Snakes
naomi bohanan
my crunchy jaw bones and blood leaked down
crushed dogs on the side of the road and later sat.
loud whimpers that stayed in cracked tiles. fire came, then flailed on wallpaper in desperation. Warning in
covered up deaths. I’m throwing with tiny fists, fists
anything. I cut my hands on the bathroom mirror.
It cuts. through. all my skins. I’m bare. as fingernails.
strike white cells behind my head’s 1st shell, let them
black baby snakes sing to me. Let them hug my
breath, it was holding tight. willing. waiting. My
shifting, it predicted that. It squeezed tighter,
a warmer poison infused blanket for me. A warm,
hide out.
heads
tearing
bare
bones and
into skull.
stripping
big bellied
mamas,
mold
formed on
old torn
skin
yearning.
too.
Twisty and turny black baby snakes taste
my itchy throat. I was a baby too when I
vomited. black baby snakes in the sink in
gurgling sounds and heaving sounds and
clinging sounds of black baby snakeheads
hitting the bathroom mirror. Hitting:
the mirror, the mirror, the mirror. The mirror.
Black baby snakes teething fangs
gnaw the inside of my cheeks and soft
neck to poison my nerve noises. My
tongue flaps against its roof, stretching,
knotting itself in layers. Forming into
a cozy, slimed nest for black baby snakes. They
curl in, facing heads out from my sleeping
mouth. Black baby snakes burst out my ear holes
in smoke lines then squeeze. my body. so
tight. I turn. pale raisin. Black baby snakes tell
each breath and eyeball when to fall backward
or outwards or to light on fire, to spill eye juice,
to explode, to shake black baby snakes to sleep.
They say they were birthed through the black holes in my skull and that there are no more black brains
to eat. Black baby snakes want to leave me. Black
baby snakes curling in, facing fangs out from my sleeping mouth. Their skinny tongues stretch out
and knot into warm nests for lost babies with brains
to fall in.