Snake Bite

© 2003 Deborah Cimo
All rights reserved.

Slim wolf fangs needle
through her rubber-skin.
Red-button welts, parallel ice,
drive through sticky veins
ripe with previous poisons;
this time unlike last time.

Poison swallowed, belly flushed--
stark, purified by common sense.
Bald, flat faces... too self-conscious
to face them, face them all,
consumed by hasty affairs.
She, they said, had done this thing
she didn't remember doing.

The sense, it is real,
of something stopping life.
Frozen. This time she memorized
the numbness as it
varnished her stinging brain.

Blue volts rise in her soles,
purple paths along arteries throbbing;
her ankles are rock marble white.
If she could chisel them only,
free of their bone locks.

Again, there, the purple;
dividing, splintered, catapulting.
Monochrome kaleidoscope bursting
her eyes. Blinking, they do not close.
Blinking, hey won't close!

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