across the street lives
a woman with snakes in
her hair. she watches me
from between the rotting drapes
that keep the sun from
melting her living room furniture
I sit at the breakfast table and wonder
if she has to feed each snake head
individually, or if they're just like hair,
and just need a shampooing,
now and then
I imagine her dipping her entire head
into a cage full of frightened
rats, the snakes in her hair darting
this way and that, tangling around each other
in their haste to catch the fat ones, the ones
with the least demented testicles. tiny bones
crunch in my head
as I close my own teeth on a spoonful
of toasted oak flakes
Holly Day is a travel writing instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities.