Self-Portrait as a Rat Snake

I heard her shrieks as she ran the length between the little barn

and our back patio. My older sister, feeding livestock in the pewter

dawn, stumbled on a rat snake with a baby chick halfway down its gullet.

It had squeezed its head through a wire hole and into the incubator,

where just-hatched birds lay huddled beneath a heat lamp. After she

refused this chore, I held my breath each time I opened the barn door,

braced myself for spectacle of a serpent sliding from the underworld,

demise of an innocent being in the spotlight of an artificial sun.

The chicks all looked the same, each one a familiar story. As they sat

behind netting, their down developed into useless feathers.

I returned on those humid mornings and wondered: did my sister see

a rat snake eating a chick, or an ouroboros consuming its own tail?

I swear, I could feel it there: cursed creature caught in a loop, blind

to the damage caused in its search for where it begins & ends.

And when it swallowed everything that came prior, did we learn how

many selves we must be before the story changes?

Kate MacLauchlan's poems can be found in North American Review's Open Space, Lily Poetry Review, Lavender Review, The Marbled Sigh Journal, and others.