Possession

 

Kay Sundstrom

I.

A flicker of incandescence, an albino snake

gleaming like the hood ornament of a long, black limousine

that waited for the bride with her choker of pearls,

crescent moons of ashes beneath her eyes.

“Only the best for my wife,” he said, closing the door

with a clang and a shout as metal hit metal.

The snake waits for me and my red, red mouth.

She marks me: two holes, dark as rotting plums.

So I lick the blood, the tart sting of milk poison.

Mother’s milk cures all, a plague of black boils.

I want this snake who plaits and raddles my bones,

pricks my nerves as the veil pricked the bride’s pallid face.

She fills my mouth with portents and thirty silver coins.

He received the bride’s price one night in blood.

When BlueBeard strung the pale, skinned heads of his wives,

the heads circled the room, thirty moons of ivory.

So the bride tore open his throat by the light of their faces.

Blots of red splatter her white, white skin,

hardening into scales, then paling into ice.

II.

“I wish I had given him the pox, a slower death,” the bride says in my voice.

She now wears my body as he wore out hers

with babes and blows and a long, black belt,

his sharp knife waiting until he was done, until she was undone.

Her hand fits inside mine, wearing my skin, wedding gloves.

“This is how it was.” We prick my cheek with a pin. “Blood here.

Blood there,” as we slice my open thighs, a sliver, a shiver.

He had already taken her, a dull blunt thudding inside,

smeared her blood into her hair

to mark her as his own before the wedding day.

“Here comes the Bride” rattles in our heads. We hiss.

Our forked tongues touch the mirror as we write out our names.

Will we turn to stone? “No, that is for the man.”

Raped by a god, Medusa told stories—”This one tried so hard”—

touching a grey stone arm,

snakes coiling and weaving to the cadence of her voice.

“He is stone now,” we say, “a white marble tombstone.”

There is no heaven. There is no hell. “Just here.”

We touch our teeth’s sharp tips, tasting burning white sweetness.

So when we bite, there will be no apple this time,

just blue and blackened flesh. They will all fall down.