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Rattlesnake Bites Man in Walmart Garden Center
by Laura Shovan
He thought it was a stick lying on the mulch.
His fingers grasped what he thought was wood,
but too giving. A moment of cool, relaxed flesh.
A moment of muscles in reaction.
The startled rattler bit him — surprised
as the man to find itself at Walmart.
With his work boots, he tap danced
on the four buttons of its rattle, its sticky backbone
no longer than a school-child’s plastic ruler.
Officials reviewed security camera footage
to see how the snake could have got there,
but called it an isolated incident of nature.
Six vials of anti-venom and a diapering
of bandages. It’s the only treatment.
Forget cutting the bite open and sucking out
the venom with your hungry lips.
One bite, my fellow shopper,
and we are back to Eden.
Editor of Little Patuxent Review, Laura Shovan (website) was a finalist for the 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her chapbook Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone won the 2009 Harriss Poetry Prize. She edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program, for which she teaches.
Aphids
by Laura Shovan
My daughter
says she will
join me
on the steps
with a book
while I
regard our
back garden.
She does not come.
In the heat
and stillness,
movement.
A praying mantis
in the lattice
and clematis vine,
body mottled
brown speckled,
head like
a heart or
arrow. It
hangs from a
wood slat,
shadowed.
Green intention.
I think it will
eat the aphids
gathered yellow
on the vine
but it wavers,
its mind
is not in keeping
with mine,
walks its slow
sticky walk
some other
direction.
I wait for
my daughter.
She has promised
to come out.
Editor of Little Patuxent Review, Laura Shovan (website) was a finalist for the 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award. Her chapbook Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone won the 2009 Harriss Poetry Prize. She edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence Program, for which she teaches.
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