The apples can’t rot

fast enough. They pile the orchard

like festered questions

or six-thousand coins that can’t

buy bread. See them squeeze

their mother-trunks. There's humanity

in your eyes, little one,

but also, strangely,

something else. Let me tell you

the tale of the anaconda

and the woman who named it Kyle,

let it skulk her hallways freely,

feed from her hand, let it

coil next to her in bed,

sweet and harmless

as a cinnamon bun, until

the night she woke to find it

stretched straight beside her,

its six feet the length of her,

lying as a man might lie.

Did she think,

for even a moment,

that she turned it human,

that her love did that?

A vet delivered the punchline—

the snake was sizing her up

to eat her whole. Oh love,

oh baby, Mamma’s gon’

buy you a mockingbird.

Seeping into gray-green graves,

the apples listen in.

There is no sequestering

the heart’s slow spill.

Jessica Love is a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at University of Illinois. Her creative work has recently appeared in The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, and The American Scholar, where she also writes a weekly blog about language and the mind, Psycho Babble.