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Get Cara Losier Chanoine’s writing in the FREE PDF file 2013 poetry chapbook How a Bullet Behaves				You can also order this as a 2013 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book How a Bullet Behaves

Costumes

Cara Losier Chanoine

The he in the dream
wears the face of a painted devil.
He stands in a circle of snakes,
each held in place by a knife through its tail.
He prods them with his cane tip,
crouches low to marvel at the groans
Shuddering free from beneath their rippled scales.
His mouth cracks into a broken smile.

The snakes yawn their mouths wide,
pull against their blades and lift their heads off the floor.
At first, he fails to notice that they’ve begun
to slip their skins.
They move like parts of the same serpent,
and each one begins to birth a woman
through the cavern of its jaws.
They shed scales
and sprout limbs in fast-forward: accelerated evolution.
They scatter quickly, rising onto their sculpted legs,
speaking thick words in an unfamiliar language.

The he in the dream is reluctant to move
in the wake of their departure.
His chest is cold; he grips his cane with both hands.
He leans forward and touches one of the empty snakes,
stares hard at its clouded, vacant eyes.
A flake of his painted face peels free
and falls to the floor.
The he in the dream realizes that he is,
for the first time,
on the wrong side of fear.

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