Rachel DeWoskin

sestina for the snake in a man-made lake

scaled head just above
the surface shattered when shot
by the bb gun a boy was teaching me not
to use but to love. see? when he fired,
i cried. shocked, concentric blood
on water gellish, dingy, ringing.

shadow under a flipped boat, ringing
with his laughter, hard shell above
us, i laughed, too. the metal blood
smell of that boat stays like a snapshot,
something visible, real, 3-d, fired
from inside, a violence not

easy to stop, to clock, to get. not
bullet, not venomous light, not ringing
leaves glimpsed from under a fired
edge of rust. more like the boy above
me, his skin hot, closed eyes lovely, shot
through: lashes, freckles, veins, blood

running under his lids and mine, blood
keeping us alive, combined we cannot
be cold-scaled, frail, must give this a shot:
to see forever, hear time bringing
forth anything other than being above
fear, young. the bristling world fired

iridescence up for us, fired
off a memory the color of his blood
inside him, submerged, safe, blue, not
purple on the water. beauty ringing
in the distance shot

in the dark, guess, can a trick shot
hold us? he’s gone now, fired
past this invisible, ringing
future, where snake blood
stays on the lake, scales explode, not
sunk but sprayed into a halo above
 
the scene where I was (am) hidden, boat, blood
present tense a taste, glint, skin of a snake not
dead yet, nor alive, all over, under and above.
 

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Rachel DeWoskin is the author of five critically acclaimed novels: Banshee; Someday We Will Fly; Blind; Big Girl Small, and Repeat After Me; and the memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing, about the years she spent in Beijing as the unlikely star of a Chinese soap opera. Her poetry collection Two Menus, is forthcoming in 2020 from the University of Chicago Press. DeWoskin has published essays, poems, reviews, and translations in magazines and journals including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Conde Nast Traveler, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Far Eastern Economic Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The New Delta Review, The New Orleans Review, Seneca Review, and numerous anthologies. She is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago.