Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture &amp; Social Justice Issue 46.2 (2025) Special Issue: Gender and Climate Justice Literary Work
The Farmer and the Snake

It is my will to bite when I come to and find myself smothered against your chest.

My fangs ask no questions, simply engage in a dance of stimulation and response.

But you never were a very good dancer, were you Farmer?

I am a question, long and hot against the ground, raveling and unravelling like a sailor’s rope — which font will I coil into today?

It is always a question of what I choose or do not choose
to do.

Shoulderlessly, I shrug it off — the skin you touched, the hewn stone scales you picked at. I leave them behind in the dirt.

There is no me that was handled by you.

I bit off my own tail, made myself a bleeding sock,

slunk into a hole in the ground. I froze myself in a bucket, slept
in a curlicue of ice crystals.

But still you reach your short and greedy fingers into my den.
I feel the earth falling over me, so I bite down hard
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and you yelp like a struck hound. I expect dashed brains, so my middle contracts and I make myself small. How unsweet! But you forgot what kind of thing I am —
Farmer, you and I were never friends. No matter how familiar you make yourself with the small red ribbon I keep between the pages of my jaws, you can never read what I have written with my body.
Sophia Godsoe (she/her) is a writer, editor, and graduate of Mount Saint Vincent University in Kjipuktuk. Her poems have appeared in Toronto's Lived Magazine and she was shortlisted for the WFNS Rita Joe Poetry Prize in 2022. She will be attending UNB in the fall to earn her Master's of Creative Writing.
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