A Sunday Drive​

Issue 18

My father stops the car
short of hitting it,
a rattlesnake,
six feet of venom,
sunning itself on the pavement.

Dad exits the car,
mother screaming,
"What are you doing?"
He walks to the side of the road,
retrieves a tree limb,
and begins poking death.

The snake coils
ready to strike.

Mother cracks her window,
only an inch, as if she thinks
the snake will jump in the window
latch onto her ear
and chew on it
over tea.

"Get back in the car," she screams.

Dad straddles the two-lane road
high in the Rocky Mountains,
tree limb pinning the snake
to the asphalt,
his hand closing around its neck.

Five feet from the car,
he holds it up,
the snake writhing.

"Get that thing away from here!"

Then he swings it,
a lasso above his head
and slings it
thirty yards into the pines.

Back in the car,
we slither on down the road.

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SCOTT SHARPE loves to write poetry that makes the banal collide with the world just beyond our grasp. He has been published in Workers Write!, Comical Cadence and Pretty Near Poems for Humor Consumers and Irony Buffs, among others.
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