Two Poems

Henri Rousseau, The Snake Charmer, 1907, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

Eel Man 

Catskills. Eel rack. Tarpaper shack. He butchers the tank of intestines coiling curling live gears turning undulating swirling whirling, until ready to bleed them he snips their tails, hanging them up by their heads.  She said, “I had a small one I kept in a 55-gallon tank. She would eat from my hand! After years like that, she escaped. I found her dried up and dead under a chair. I cried buckets!” The fortunate ones cavort entwined, rolling across dry lands in giant eel orgies, using moist bodies as bridges to spawn in their watery wombs. She heard him say that residents of Pohnpei are descended from eels, they’d no more eat one than he’d eat a kitten. But he’s feeding them dog food, watching tasty pets getting fatter and fatter. “Apicius elvers, the best eels for you, dear”; he served a surfeit. But she knew to pass on eel sushi, when injected in rabbits just one cc causes deathly convulsions. As the Eel Man knows, if you listen at night, eels sound eerily like the baying of hounds, the cry of a baby, or perhaps  a woman.

Blonde Ambition 

Menara Petronas – the Petronas twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Eighty-eight storeys of ambition –
steel and glass towers taper,
transforming skyline and capital.

Sunlight refracts, design flares,
two interlocking squares, knit
patterns of eight-pointed stars.

Your bar-coded symmetry engineers
metallic silver threads into a cone bra –
the brocade chain mail of a material girl.

Elizabeth Wilson Davies is a poet from Pembrokeshire in west Wales. She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Postcolonial Literatures and has received mentoring support through the Literature Wales scheme from Welsh poets Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch and Paul Henry. She was awarded a Literature Wales New Writer’s Bursary and recently won first prize in the PENfro Literature Festival for her poem ‘Heartland’. Follow her on Twitter @LizWilsonDavies