Pascale Petit: Serpentarium

Serpentarium

She can fit a thirty-foot giant

into one sheet of A4,

 

pack pythons

into her sketchbook,

 

squeezing their loops

in tight breeding-balls, until

 

the man comes with his forked stick

and pins her head down.

 

She must have been drawing

too fast, her tail in her mouth

 

like Ouroboros—that’s

what they call her when

 

she goes crazy. Years ago

they sewed up

 

her mouth. Now,

a nurse comes to unstitch her.

 

He nails her head on a hook,

but that’s just the beginning, she

 

knows it gets worse.

She thinks if she can draw

 

enough snakes she’ll get

used to it, stop her eyes blinking

 

when he shoves the hose

down her throat, makes the room tilt,

 

water poured into her stomach,

her jaws unhinged. Three of them

 

holding her down

to strap her arms to her chest,

 

while she thrashes against the memory—

always the same memory

 

of the reptile she met that day

on the Petit Pont,

 

who insisted they go dancing,

then escorted her to the hotel

 

and seized her in his coils,

who thrust his hemipenis

 

into every orifice,

murmuring how snake sex

 

can take a whole night.

Every scratch from his mating spur

 

made her want to rip her skin off.

Even when someone came in

 

he kept going,

laughing at her.

 

Years, his eggs have stayed inside her,

ready to hatch in this sketchpad:

 

cobras, cascabels, condas,

tree boas, harlequins.

 

She strokes the retic—

her hog-swallower.

 

She fills in the last cross-hatch

on his snout, can feel the skin

 

loosening around his mouth,

ready for the moult.

 

She waits for lights-out,

smudges carefully with the eraser,

 

easing his skin like a dress

pulled over a girl’s head,

 

the pencil of herself

blunt, her work done,

 

her own face empty

on the pillow beside her.

Pascale Petit