Aimée Keeble


enfants terribles

There are copperheads in the garden, little saints waiting to deliver me of unbiased opinion. They are the unspoken resentment of my neighbor. I think of them late at night, waiting to crawl into me and settling like noxious bubbas. My small coils of no. My tender creeps.

The big one— saucy and all epaxial, sat in my lap as the moon screamed up. And we both cried snaky tears. I held his trembling length, opaline as a prepuce divine. We both sorry, for the bites we did and do and will do.

In mornings the color of hot melancholy, I wrap my copperheads around my wrists, my waist- the little ones loop my ankles. Saturn-like, their mechanism of formation no body’s damn business.

Women and their serpents: Angitia, Medusa, Eve, Lamia, Lilith, the leathery white of half-cracked shells in lieu of something pink and mammalian— umbilically swinging.

My slithery litter. We host hissing competitions and swallow furry things whole. We on our stomachs in the grass bloating with sunshine.

I am yellowing with venom — close enough to god gold.

Brexit

these un-snipped men
blanched and boiled on rain and discontent
penises like pale eels
a league of original English
grown great and then a shattering:
the sky has become too heavy-
too white




Aimée Keeble's work has been published by Scalawag, the Lighthouse Journal, Forward Poetry, Killer and a Sweet Thang, Southlight, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Oh Comely, All Those Things Left Unsaid, The Medusa Review, and Ink, Sweat, and Tears. "enfants terribles" was recently broadcast on Totally Wired Radio.

She has exhibited her poetry at Flint Gallery in Norwich, theprintspace in London, and the Superette Gallery in Paris as a part of Never Turn Back, a photographic project headed by Dean Chalkley. The two have collaborated on a publication titled One which is available through Antenne Books. Aimée has her Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland at the David Black Agency.

She is the grand-niece of Beat writer and poet Alexander Trocchi.
 
 
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