Its Own Egg and if we were to keep this small thing that now probably looks like the new born mice we feed to the snake we bought together i know he’d want to name it penny or lucy or jude if it were a boy but that’s all just silly and we videotaped the snake swallowing its first pinky - that’s what the guy at the pet store called it anyway- a mouse the size of a thimble and pink all over but its tiny chest was blood red its hairless skin, its still and silent heart and after the snake swallowed it, after she maneuvered her jaws bit by bit around its body there was a lump in her gut and I could tell it hurt to contract the muscles to push it down and down until it disappeared and i remember one night several weeks later ten gleaming white eggs piled up under the snake’s yellow bedding in the corner and i heard something flop against the glass the snake struggling to get something down her mouth wide, holding its own egg where inside a tinier version of her was building itself and i knew her fangs had worked their way into the egg, into whatever was inside and the shell cracked and goop and blood flooded out and i imagined what it would taste like to eat those things - those little red hearts that used to beat and scales that might glimmer in the light all sliding down beneath my own cold scales Meredith Jones. If you've any comments on this poem, Meredith Jones would be pleased to hear them.