Rachel Rosenberg- Three Poems

I am the Rattle, you are the Snake

One day, maybe, you'll see what I tried to give you.
Today there is poison in my heart.
I will call someone else for the sucking and the spitting.
I will call someone else for the tourniquets and the leeches
I will call him anti-venom.

Eve on my shoulders

Just the way you move,
maybe you're telling me something.
You could be squeezing out poetry with your sinews,
the flicks of your tongue on my arm.
The way you grace my shoulders,
move your flat little head so curiously at the world around you,
tucking your neck through the spaces between my fingers.

You're coldblooded but very affectionate,

I am a warm tree that grows mice,

one live mouse every week

that you can strangle and swallow.

I have also been known to choke things and swallow them.

You have decided that you are my hair tie;

you wrap your fat little body up around my ponytail

and peek out from behind my ears.

Snake Palms

The snakes were all brightly colored and so
I was afraid they were poisonous,
and then three bit one palm and two the other
and they dangled there for a while,
teeth sunk into me.

For the rest of the dream I walked around,
showing my scarred palms to the world.



Short Bio: 
Rachel Rosenberg is a 25-year-old lawyer/recent graduate of Lewis & Clark Law School and an alumnus of Kenyon College. She has been writing poetry for 17 years and performing it for the last two. Her poems have been published in a number of online and print journals, most recently in The Leaning House Press and The Sparrow Ghost Collective Anthology of Poetry: Vol.'s 1 and 2.