OPHIDIA
Ros Barber
The heat of last night's sex cooked under covers
is sufficient to stir me. I bask until warm enough
to writhe. Did I curl too much to accommodate
your shape? In the stealth of first light, I am recast.
Beside your turned, satisfied back, under
the brown-yellow zig zags of your duvet,
I elongate and slim. My skin, scarred and
stretched too far by another man's sons,
by your demands, heals and scales.
As a mother's womb reclaims the resources
of a dead foetus, my body reabsorbs my limbs;
I hiss and coil myself like a rope.
My legs will no longer part for you, fused
and sheathed as they are; I haven't
the arms to return to comfort now, but that is fair
after years of slinking in and out of your bed
at your command. I turn my new-cast reptilian
slit of an eye to the scatter of moles
like mouse droppings across your scapula;
see your wife's half of the wardrobe recently emptied,
door hanging slack as a belly after birth,
and with my arrow tongue I taste and scent
all at once - the tip quivering the way
you liked it around your coronal ridge.
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