Description
Jane Morton’s debut chapbook Snake Lore explores the intimacy and violence born of a particular place, weaving a broken narrative fraught with the tangled dynamics of individuals and their environment. This collection is steeped in dirt and framed within the politics of disgust concerning sexuality and the gendered body in the often-fantastical world of the American South. Morton uses formal play to hold contradictions together—a contrapuntal poem to tell two versions of a story, or a string of sonnets, which queer the form from poem to poem, invoking both familiarity and mutation. In these poems, spiritual and religious concerns—the beauty and the harm that they potentiate—converge and haunt.
SNAKE LORE
A flock of open throats spills
noise like sun over the dirt
out back, meaning a snake is near.
Each body a quiver,
scaled feet all claws. Each point
a portent scabbing over. Tell me
again what it means
to keep a snake in the home,
about the girl who let the snake
in her back yard drink
from her, who held the snake
in her lap like an infant, her chest
bent to him. How sickly
she was and pale and her eyes
bloodless yellow and how cold.
Tell me again
how they found the snake
behind her house
and cut his head off
with the garden hoe and draped
the body over the fence.
How when they went to check
on the girl in her bed,
always in her bed until late
in the morning she was dead too,
her blue neck bent and strangled.
You can hear the snake’s
rattle, quiet underneath
the birds’ bloody murder cries
if you listen close. You can hear
the snake’s cold belly
winding in the dust. That snake
ate all our chickens’ eggs
and then ate all our chickens too.
Tell me again
how we are watched over, all
of us, by a jealous god.
How he knows each hair
on our pretty heads, each scale
on our twisting backs.
