The Copperhead

Grandmother Ella Zoa
would never have flailed
with the hoe as I did
in my driveway at dusk,
hacking the copperhead
that had dared to slither
its way into the open
for some residual heat
only to be surprised
by a backpedaling man
hurrying to convert
garden tool to weapon
with uplifted hands,
protecting all mammals
from that sneaky reptile:
no, she would've calmly
lifted the wooden handle
then brought the blade
down, fast, once, clean,
as if targeting a weed
in her vegetable patch,
venemous head severed
from the whiplash body
she'd raise up draped
over the once-red metal
and toss still squirming
into the viney thickets,
as taught by her great-aunt
when men were blasting
the long tunnel through
old Beaucatcher Mountain
just before the Depression,
deep dynamite charges
spooking hidden snakes
downhill into Asheville
where unruffled women
in their narrow yards
deftly dispatched them,
not swearing and striking
bright panicky sparks
from the radiant concrete
by smiting the cold meat
again and again and again,
by chopping that writhing
into bits of raw muscle
that couldn't slip away,
by making the already-dead
as dead as humanly possible.

Michael McFee's seventh collection of poetry, Shinemaster, was published in January by Carnegie Mellon University Press, publisher of his previous books Earthly (2001) and Colander (1996). His book of prose The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview is forthcoming from the University of Tennessee Press this September. New poems have appeared recently in Cincinnati Review, Threepenny Review, Harper's Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, and Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South (University of North Carolina Press).