John swept leaves into a pile on the porch.
Our neighbor turned the dirt
of her balcony planters with her hand trowel
and lined them with snakeskin—to scare off squirrels.
I saw their ghosts slither with the wind.
My mind exploded in secret.
*
Tenderness hardwired to tenderness breaks the body
down, throws its aches
into the spine while the earth cracks
its transistors and goes quiet.
In my head, I saw bodies slithering
through the piles of leaves,
*
the rot warming them. Once, I held a snake,
and it arced dark electricity
through the sunlight. The eternal static
encased in its skull. I asked, Do you feel it,
and he said, I feel it. What is it
that wires one body to another? And where
are the wires that pull a body back into the earth
*
where it grows tender and gone? Sometimes,
I think of leaves as sad sparks
coming back to their source. It was fall.
The snakeskins whipped in the background.
Somewhere, a body moved through
the dead. I could hear it—
the electric hiss of ripping skin
as a head breaks through the husk it once called itself.