Serpentine
She’s a pretty rad girl;
textured like an old silk scarf, splashed in red and dust.
It’s strange to lie on my belly on my bedroom floor and
watch her watching me and wonder what she thinks she is watching.
Weird to see something that has evolved to a single stroke of myth and muscle
finding her new landscape among dusty wooden boards and towering Swedish bookshelves
the forests of the Carolinas forgotten.
Weird that an apex predator likes Ed Sheeran; she swims in the bass, presses her checkerboard belly
to glass, watches me with odd animal eyes.
Around my neck she is a cold pressure, easing and pulling to a rhythm like a seasoned rower.
If she comes close enough I can feel her tiny breaths on my skin
hear the squeaking vocalisations that I worried over before reading that
sometimes they do that when they’re excited.
It’s very strange and cool to think that
my highly-evolved and jewel-toned companion finds me exciting the way I find her exciting.
I’m under no illusion that she needs me;
once a week when I feed her she goes
wild, and I see the endearing awkwardness of my bumbling friend disappear
behind a loose-jawed smile as she swallows the mouse. A few days after
and she is back, sweet and weird, and
excited to disappear down my sleeve, where she is not allowed to go.
Daisy Harris
This is about my pet Carolina corn snake, Rowan
Daisy Harris Poetry 