HONORABLE MENTION, 2023 SMALL ORANGE EMERGING WOMAN POET HONOR

Con La Serpiente

Sleeping in craggy eights, deforming

socks and bedsheets. The fever

of the heatlamp watches the cat-eye

yellow of its prowl. Every escape

is an art form. God created

the serpent from mercury,

the glassy mirror in the basement.

To not frighten the mindless

and tender creatures lopping

in the field. The night opens

a faucet of metallic light, the usual

chores. There, an ambush of stars

in a new dark. Now, each peel

of our skin in the kitchen

slinks on like gnarled bouquets

over a burial place. Between us—

sometimes that genre of silence.

We wash and eat bruised

strawberries swallowed whole.

Pink as tongues. Small as eyes.

It frightens me how much we can love

when starving. Where is the cage

now? Make of us

little beasts.

Jai Hamid Bashir is an intergenerational Pakistani-American artist. Her work has recently appeared in POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, MIZNA, Crazyhorse, Radar, Guernica Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Arkansas International, and others. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize, and was anthologized in 2022’s The Best of the Net. She graduated from Columbia University and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.