While she’s bragging, the cash register
beeps and a blacksnake in someone’s barn
kills another rodent and grows
a little longer, like the story
she’s telling to the other clerk
who’s running cans of 4 wheeler oil
along her conveyer belt.
A man once told me to kill my own snakes
before I married his daughter.
When she left, I lived in the woods
for a year and there were snakes
but I never saw any until I moved
to town and stared in a mirror one night.
It was after I fucked Debbie
and she fucked me after we ate dinner
and talked about abandonment,
loves lost, a reptilian reflection
in a mirror that might have killed me.
Which brings me back to Tractor Supply,
and wishing I’d met this girl in high school.
Maybe I would still have a few snakes
if they’d stayed in the barn.
