Snakes All the Way Down

Lou Terlikowski

I used to think the river ran with coppers,

felt their slithering bellies against my hip

with every brush of leaf or litter, their teeth

in every twig. One summer, there was a girl,

barely three, who died before she ever dreamed

of crying or kicking clear. It was the babies—

a whole swarm of them. And it was the babies

that loosened venom wild before the copper

came rising through their scales. I dreamed

them, big as a minute, their own river—hip

high, humming with hiss, and the girl

sinking to the bottom, blanketed in teeth 

and crimson. Surely, there were teeth 

waiting beneath the murk and mud, babies

still blind who were told of a girl 

whose foot came down seeking copper—

deadly foot kicking dust into the current, deadly hip

the size of God. Surely, they must have dreamed

a hundred deaths at my girlish hands—dreamed

my nightmarish being, all warp and rumble and teeth.

I could not show them the soft pink of my hip

for fear of myself—the way I must have looked to the babies

in river-refracted light. Surely, they could smell the copper

of my blood, beating into my ears, remembering the girl. 

I don’t know if they showed her tiny, blue body—girl

turned bloated anonymous, or if I simply dreamed

it, but the swell of her curled with the coppers

in the riverbed of my imagination, fingers like teeth

clawing at the water. Did she haunt the babies

too? Could they see her rotting hand reaching for my hip? 

My river dissolved with the growing curve of my hips,

replaced with empty rush and the smell of fish—girl

eroded to smooth nothing. My monsters turned babies

wriggling in the water and the threat of venom, a dream

in distant memory. If the river ever ran with teeth,

surely it went dry come summer, sun bleached the coppers

bare. Surely, the girl, cut from my own hip, dripping 

with babies and the promise of glowing copper, never sank

her teeth into me—her wet hunger in wait, surely a dream.