Looking back to a summer
afternoon,
where I hid behind every table
with my back straight
and my arms held down
a forced gentle on my face,

I felt like a rattlesnake,
waiting.

I've never been tame - and
I wasn't even, then.
I've never been possessed.
     I've never been locked inside a
room in June - your hand pressing on the silver handle
with its cracks and fractures, its creaky breath rattling like tuberculosis
- your black ash streaming lungs
your history of slithering poison where neither you nor I had
legs to crawl away

The longer the days go
between then's dewy porcelain and the now, and the
shadowy sound of your breathing,
the more I simmer and smolder my snake-seethe and fume
your venom never owned me -

I molted when locked in that room.