Snakehandling Elegy

It was a new type of excess: a slithering. The movements, choreographed, sky above her pink as a pregnancy test

—the forgetting, hovering. In pews, they mapped the rhythm of grief; she was far from home, swallowed half-whole

in the sound of tongues, two of her children lost to cystic fibrosis. Appalachia, that autumn:

a halfway house of dying trees. In the shadow of sobriety, she must have courted the absence

of absence, the dimebag flakes of a once held thing—to be remade in regurgitated grace. It must have been shocking:

a keeled-cloud lifted above the pulpit; an arm, coiled immutably, wrenched from

its socket; the convulsions of a room’s held-breath; harmony rising out the rattles. I wonder what succor was

in that sickly swelling miracle music as it raged tambourine-green; if the lungs she carried were

whole-breached; if that was when those atrophied hands crawled into her cradles and—rocking,

rocking, like dislodged algae—fanged from her agony a curfew. In elegy’s crawlspace, tiny padded rooms.