MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES
On the flight home
I read the poet’s novel
about poets
fucking & going
mad. I can still feel
the heat of her.
Dear little tongue, red as grenadine.
Sugar in your teacup, soot in your cream.
This is the sound of a snake shedding its
skin.
Night after night,
ringing its lover’s
doorbell.
Mother-
fucking
snakes.
When the two sisters accidentally marry stars—
That’s when I cry.
Bodies burning through sky.
I lift the forbidden rock.
Peer down at the sidewalk.
Take in the stomped husks
of lanternflies,
shattered
wind-
shield,
a penny,
luck-
side
down.
IN THE STORY “SURVIVAL” by RITA JOE
Parents sacrifice their child to the snow.
Dress her in skins tanned with liver & brain.
Such is the logic of dying.
If our baby freezes to death,
we’ll survive by eating her flesh.
Weeping, she’s loosed through a hole in the roof.
Near dawn, the wind still a-howlin’
through the hole, the dead girl
comes crawlin’
blood on blue
lips
an unnatural hue
from suckling
a frozen beaver’s tail.
Biographical Statement
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of two books of poetry: Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press), which won the 2024 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and What Came Down in the Smoke (forthcoming in 2026 from JackLeg Press). Her creative work has been supported by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MacDowell, NYSCA/NYFA, and Vermont Studio Center. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press), Allium, Ballast, Bedfellows, Heavy Feather Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Northern New England Review, Tyger Quarterly, Waxwing, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media artworks have been featured in exhibitions across the United States. They are included in the permanent collections of The University of Hartford and The University of Southern Maine. Summer is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.