What Creature

Brian Clifton
| poetry

 

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.

Brian Clifton is an avid collector of records and curiosities. Their work can be found in: Pleiades, Beloit Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines.

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