“Snake Molting” by Lora Keller
The itch starts at her eyes
and sweeps down the pulsing
muscle of her body.
She swells and shimmies
around fossil-pocked boulders,
silvered driftwood.
When she can’t find a bristled
surface, she loops into her own
strained and crusty flesh
and peels
herself
from herself.
She’s a single-limbed ballerina
tugging off her tights,
a wrinkled pool
of inside-out skin
coiled beside her,
traces of grass and beetle grub
still etched in its grooves,
her quaking spine sealed
in the gauze of new skin.
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Lora Keller’s Artist Statement: A typewriter was my favorite toy when I was 10 years old. Every chance I got, I cultivated my alter egos: writer vs business woman. I typed poems and invoices, plays and inventories. And, at nearly 60 years old, I’m still enthralled by the way those competing interests conflict and converge in my adult life. After earning a creative writing degree, I was a scriptwriter, public relations executive and educator in Milwaukee, New York and Kansas City. Now when I’m not writing poetry, I own and run two small, Milwaukee businesses. In the last few years, dozens of my poems have been published in literary media including Blast Furnace, Lantern Journal, Literary Mama, Midwest Prairie Review, Midwest Quarterly, NPR’s Tell Me More blog, Poised In Flight, Red River Review, Reed Magazine and Xanadu.
