When snakes writhe up
from the thawed ground, she steps carefully
and tries not to begrudge the cold-blooded desire
which leaves the creatures undulating in the sun-
warmed gravel or threading themselves
through the south-facing porch rails.
Something languid and true in their unbinding,
in their spring hunger. She finds them swallowing
eggs in the chicken house, fledglings in the redbuds,
even cicadas slick with their own unsheathing.
Down by the creek, she happens upon a black racer,
jaw unhinged around a lifeless copperhead, the dead snake
so large she wonders, just how the other will complete the job.
Nohl tells her to take the .22 when she goes walking,
that it’s an hour at least to a hospital
that could treat a strike from a timber rattler,
but she prefers to watch the ground.
Secretly, she studies the skins shed on the rocks
that line the garden, runs her fingertips over scales
transformed to dust. Time was she, too,
could have swallowed the world whole.
He has always been better with his hands
than his words. Never one to inscribe his own
message into a card honoring a birthday or anniversary.
So he was pleased to find the gift in a farmhouse
scheduled for demolition. He was working
with a team to tear out leaded windows
and ancient transoms, the solid doors
with their knobs of cloudy crystal,
but it was the items his boss deemed discard
that held Nohl’s attention—a wooden box of skeleton
keys on a closet shelf, clothing patterns (feathery
and brittled) beneath a moldering pin cushion,
and a walnut-framed mirror. The size of a dinner plate,
it swiveled on a base carved with bees and flowers.
He took the looking glass home because Grace liked old things, certain
he could resilver the surface which was darkened, silt-
laced like river water.
No, she said, leave it, prefering to keep the artifact
as it was. And still, she stares into the smoke a moment
each morning, pausing before it to touch her face, though
the glass offers no reflection.
Julie Hensley is a core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio at Eastern Kentucky University, where she teaches both fiction and poetry. She regularly accompanies students on study abroad writing residencies to Lisbon, Portugal. She has been awarded fellowships from Jentel Arts, Yaddo, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and the Tyrone Guthrie Center. Her poems and stories have appeared in dozens of journals, including Image, Indiana Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, Blueline, and Mom Egg Review. She is the author of a collection of poems, Viable (Five Oaks Press 2015), and a book of fiction, Landfall: A Ring of Stories (Ohio State University Press 2016), as well as two poetry chapbooks. The poems here are from a novel-in-poems that chronicles the courtship and marriage of a couple who builds a homestead together in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Other poems from this cycle have appeared in The Southern Review, Superstition Review, Willow Springs, Ruminate, and Rockvale Review.