Two Poems by Lindsay Young

Seven, Going on Nothing

It was my sister’s birthday eve,

the anticipation as big an event as the real thing,

even for me, who always got a sympathy gift

to curb the Little Sister envy.

I got to see the surprise cake my mom had chosen,

fresh out of a glossy flip book at the store.

A supermodel cake, impossibly symmetrical

and airbrushed heavily with icing.

I couldn’t help myself,

I had to sneak down to the fridge that night

just to get a second look. Harmless, I thought,

until my index finger

was two knuckles deep, right in the

perfect

middle

but might as well have been down my throat.

It was pathetic now seeing the exposed inside

of the cake, the who-cares vanilla flesh of it.

It felt like I’d mutilated

her 11th birthday in the refrigerator-cold

dead of night, like taking a lit candle
to the banners and a serving knife to the balloons,

blowing it out as quick as a wish.
I wiped my finger clean

against my Tweety Bird shirt.
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.

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