Liz DeGregorio
Magic
She tells you she danced to a Portishead song,
the one everyone knows,
in a strip club in Alaska, bragging that no one knew
she was still in high school at the time.
She trudges through the snow with you,
one unseasonably wet night in the Pacific Northwest,
two pairs of soaked tights,
trying to see the queer punk band in town.
Later, after a bad movie and a decent meal,
she tries on dresses in the hotel room.
Black silk lace cotton
(where to look?)
It's been decades, and try as you might,
her motives are still opaque:
just when you think you've got her figured out,
she turns away, and
you're alone in the deep, quiet dark of that hotel room.
Ophidiophobia
“Myths are explored, phobias cured, and mysteries revealed at this must-see Museum of the Southwest.” – The Official Website for Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tourism
I did no research before accepting a date’s offer to take me to the
Rattlesnake Museum & Gift Shop
in Albuquerque;
I pictured it like a small-scale version of the
American Museum of Natural History
in New York City:
Stuffed snakes arranged artfully in
life-sized dioramas…
perhaps some dangling from the ceiling,
looking poised and confident,
fun and carefree.
I was wrong because why would a museum
full of
stuffed
dead
snakes
exist?
The building was dark, damp for this desert city.
There were interconnected rooms full of not just
rattlers, but every other kind of snake who had leered at me
in my nightmares,
who had been present in that one episode of MacGyver,
where the most Renaissance of Men
had to overcome his own ophidiophobia
and save the day.
My date and I wandered from cage to cage.
He was no MacGyver.
I was not in or of my body as I looked into the
snakes’ eyes.
I grew numb:
creeping nearer to each glass tank,
examining the rope-like serpents;
their hisses drove into my ears,
wrapped around my brain.
Some snakes, they’d rise up,
their scales crawling up
the glass of their cages,
A nightmare come to life –
I didn’t trust the cages.
I didn’t trust the snakes.
I didn’t trust my date.
The snakes would lean back, then
THUMP,
their bodies hitting the clear glass.
I knew they wanted out,
they wanted to
eat me, devour me, consume me whole…
We went to a tea shop afterwards,
perhaps a kind of aftercare,
if you are the kind of person who views
a date to a building full of snakes
with a phobic woman as a sexual act,
and I do, I am that kind of person.
But he wouldn’t let me pick out my own tea,
and it was then that I rose up
the glass of my own cage,
rose up,
pushed out
and left the shop,
My skin sloughing off to release me -
My tongue flickering as I tasted the clean desert air.
Liz DeGregorio (she/her) is a poet, writer and editor whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, The Rumpus, Catapult Magazine, Bowery Gothic, Lucky Jefferson, ANMLY, SCARS Magazine, BUST, Ghouls Magazine, OyeDrum Magazine, Blink Ink, Dread Central and other publications. She's also performed at the award-winning storytelling series Stranger Stories.
