
Exuviae: Stripped from the Body
by Kent Leatham
“You have to know the normal, or you will never know the abnormal.”
(Douglas Mader, “Snake Anatomy”)
“You can rewrite but not unwrite”
(Natalie Diaz, “Snake-Light”)
When I was a boy,
my mother thumbtacked a snakeskin
in an arc over my bedroom door.
Blessing or warning, diaphanous sleeve
to a lost arm, its four-foot length
likely came from a king snake, the kind
that hunted rattlers in our yard,
making it safe for the dog and me to play.
Empty, its essence still held all
it had been.
Eventually, it disintegrated.
Now, nearing forty, knowing what I had
not yet learned about then, I think
of another lost skin, unstretched, unseen,
into which my most intimate length
was never permitted to grow—
hoodie, headscarf, balaclava,
guardian sheath of blood and nerve—
casually severed the way she taught me
to cut the head from a rattlesnake with
a shovel, should one stray too near
(Crotalus atrox, western diamondback,
focused only on eating gophers,
sluggish, shy, easily scared)
((Foreskin, twin to the clitoral hood,
fifteen square inches in adults, the size
of a 3x5 notecard, two Visa cards,
or one outheld human hand))
What makes a trophy?
What makes a threat?
Sometimes I don’t think I understand
the world at all.
Kent Leatham is a proudly pansexual poet, translator, and public educator. His work has appeared in dozens of journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He studied poetry at Emerson College and Pacific Lutheran University, taught in the California State University system for almost a decade, and currently facilitates the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium reading series.