Mithridatism
The practice of protecting oneself against a poison by gradually self-administering non-lethal amounts. Wikipedia
begin
with injection—
begin
with the venom
of diamondback
copperhead
water moccasin.
then
move on
to deadlier asps:
cobra—
not spirals
but eclipses for eyes—
black mamba—
whose mouth, when
threatening, isn’t pink
but obsidian—
then
only then
let the
caged ampersands
tag you
in the pith
of your hand
or forearm.
then
observe
how the body
fights back, suffers,
recovers—
snakebite is thus
like lovesickness
in that each time,
you’re wrecked
special and anew—
once
I met a man,
a farmer,
who bragged
he could fist
an electric fence.
once
he took me out
to a field, a pasture
of pretty cows,
grabbed
the live wire
stood before me
pulsing—
he had hung the room
with streamers
of shed skin belonging
to every snake
that ever bit him—
each volt a notch
in his belt—
if you die, you die
of a bleeding heart—
Quotes (in italics) from “Mithradites of Fond du Lac” by Kent Russell
The Believer Magazine, June 1st, 2013, Issue ninety-nine
Time Traveler
I time travel the three thousand miles to visit my daughter—
where she was born where I last nursed her, my milkiness
pooling at the corners of her mouth, her mouth pressed
against my breast. On her porch, with its jumble of flowers
and bees, one hummingbird standing still in mid-air,
she talks about when she’ll start trying—I watch her head
crown in the late afternoon sun that slants over the sound
reaching like the hands of a clock for the next hour—
how she tumbled free of me and always further westward
though I never imagined she’d return to where she began
or make a life there. I’m inside out, a sock turned on the wrong
side without its mate. I did not believe it—how fast a child
could leave. Why didn’t I pay more attention? If I’d noticed
how the raspberries by our rickety swing set came and went.
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming) and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a ‘Must Read’ by The Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She received the 2019 Phillip Booth Poetry Prize and the 2018 Samuel Allen Washington Prize. Cindy is co-poetry editor of Mom Egg Review. www.cindyveach.com