Encounters
The black snake I must encounter
to reach my writing studio
is a real snake. It elongates
its rubbery body across
warm concrete, then slips
into grass, undular in the blades.
My love sees the metaphor:
I have to reconcile the snake to write,
the way its body makes meanings,
evident as stones in the grass.
Novalis says we must romanticize
the world. Every morning,
the same snake
darkens the ground
like a declarative. I miss you.
I love you. I do not
understand. The air between us
thrills. I tingle
when it uncoils. Oh, unconcern.
I wear snakes on almost all
my fingers. My love has never
known someone so taken with snakes,
admits now he sees them
everywhere—sees me
and his original fear. But I am not afraid
of what attracts me—
new love, a stark sentence, a snake
body asserting the mystery.
Maja Lukic’s poems have appeared in New England Review, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Copper Nickel, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Poets, the Slowdown podcast, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.