Thw Winning Poems

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.

Image (photograph)

I drink, second-hand, your wine-rich breath,
the life thread you spool onto the air, fortified
with pheromones. I rub my dry, armoured crust
across the familiar skin that would puncture so easily

to my teeth now; but I have scales I can shed
whenever I like, should I outgrow you.
I am overpowered with choices. I could
inject you with my venomous milk

or wrap myself around and squeeze so tight
with love that the last cough of your breath
would stain the air. Or, thin enough at last,
crawl between your buttocks and enter you.

Copyright of this poem remains with the author.
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