Self-Portrait as Land Snail

by Nickole Brown

 

Don’t get me wrong.
I’m a modest girl, couldn’t even strip off
at one of those nudie hot springs out west,
the whole place a flotsam
of much-nursed areolas and buoyant
scrotums while I sat prim
as Gidget, legs crossed and awkwardly
smiling on the shore. It’s just that the snail
is on to something—neither boy nor girl
but both, the critter is nearly mythic—a true
hermaphrodite that all alone
will go to its own kind of cryobank and baste
itself, make a new batch of not-so-bouncies
in thin, flea-sized shells. But no, that’s not
me. That seems lonely. Better, with another
intersex other it will take
aim, flex back its bow, shoot a dart,
then wait to be impaled
in return. I couldn’t make this shit up
if I tried—this is no metaphor
but scientific fact—a telum amoris—literally,
a weapon of love—a James-Bond-worthy arrow
equipped with four blades spiked
with all the dirty talk a snail could want.
Cupid’s got nothing on this
mollusk congress, and because you know
how snails go, the foreplay is slow—
slow, slow, slow—my kind of sex—
going on and on until the hussy
who first received that dart has enough
then rises to fire back. Now, knowing this,
I can say I didn’t come out
all those years ago, whatever that means. No,
when I finally made a home
for my body in the bed of another
woman, I simply became
a land snail. Tired of being
a leaking receptacle for a man’s desire,
I needed to feel
an equal’s push against my own,
a willingness to be wounded and to
wound, receiving and giving at the same
time. Plainly said, I needed the kind of love
that finally let me take
my time; I needed to fire
an arrow of my damn own.

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NICKOLE BROWN received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition will be reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in October 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015, and the audiobook of that collection became available in 2017. She is the editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Currently, she’s at work on a bestiary of sorts about these animals, but it won’t consist of the kind of pastorals that always made her (and most of the working-class folks she knows) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. The first of these new poems won Rattle‘s 2018 Chapbook Contest with the publication of To Those Who Were Our First Gods in 2018. A second chapbook from this project, a sequence called The Donkey Elegies, will be published by Sibling Rivalry in January 2020.