Facts about Snakes & Hearts, a 2015 poetry chapbook by Flower Conroy

I Am the Medusa

Although there are ways of looking at a snake
without fragmenting,

oft our own eyes undo us.
Hallucinations slithered

& hung like mobiles in the air. Came
in the form of dreams akimbo

as fractured wrists. A garden
left to its own device

reverts back into the rich
slime of dark vegetal hours.

I was enslaved as the light of
a colossal imagination—

but whose? I
wracked my coldmind

for a clear word for fear
of what is seen, unseen.

All that. You could touch me
& not reach me. Something else moved

in the grass. Unfinished, & stoned
out of my brain on meds, an acrolith

both hatch- & receding in deep
relief, instead of the tomatoes

I watered my feet.
Sunk like ruins or an obelisk ever-

so, infinitesimal, into earth. Who
was I anymore?