Some of the best poems you'll read - Perigee

"Illusion"
by Maria Lupinacci
Maya, bare-bellied and toe-stepping
across the sand, her fingers wearing ten rings
like fireflies against the dark.
Men, she says, are mutated imps captured
during the Fall. Their tails raised
in discord, their mouths big and wanting
to swallow you; to have you live
within the fissures of their pocked skin only
to later excrete you as waste.
And women, they are snakes. Not the biblical
snakes ferried from hell: Eve's overused
symbolism of tempting fate, but snakes
in their natural sense: deftly quiet until
the mouse is in reach.
When asked of children, she shivers
before she speaks: Not all angels appear
in human shapes.
She waves them, those rings
on her fingers,
as if they were prizes to be proud of,
or gifts bestowed onto her by the deities
she adores. Maya motions you:
Walk away,
walk away.
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