Two Poems by Lindsay Young
Seven, Going on Nothing
to the banners and a serving knife to the balloons,
I wiped my finger clean
I didn’t even want to taste it.
Snake Bread
The only part of me I let my mother touch
when I was sixteen was my laundry. A lazy risk —
handing her the smells and pocketed artifacts
of places I wasn’t supposed to go.
Once, she approached me with a business card
crumbling at its washed corners.
“Snake Breader?” She scoffed.
“Do they mean Snake Breeder?”
There’s no way I could tell her
about the braided man from the night before,
his adult bottle of Everclear, the juvenile
rainbow of Gatorade mixers for me and my friend.
She wouldn’t understand that I had felt safe,
warm in my buzz, unaffected as he bragged
beneath an Alice Cooper poster, “He used my snakes”
and asked us to guess which one had inhaled a cat
live and whole, right off the window ledge.
I had even let him drape one around my shoulders
as I posed for a flip phone camera.
Flash. I gagged on a surfacing memory —
the ice bath of open-mouthed gray mice in his tub.
By now they must be thawed, stinking.
“Who is he?” She tried to bait the truth
from me with the token between her fingers.
“Some guy from school who can’t spell.”
The search light of her eyes went dark again.
Each time she brought me something,
I realized, I was quicker at swallowing it.
*
Lindsay Young has been published in the literary journals Open Ear of the Universe and Sorin Oak Review. She served as the editor of the Sorin Oak Review while studying at St. Edward’s University.
