A ball python keeps showing up in my dreams

I am watching a little boy in a red-striped shirt.
The boy’s father feeds a mouse to his sister’s snake.
The girl is maybe four years old. The boy not far behind.

*

The father makes the children watch while the snake
pulls back, wobbles just to still, and snaps at the mouse.
The father laughs, the girl laughs, but the boy cries so hard
that there is no noise wailing from his open mouth.

*

The snake’s name is Iono because the little girl tries to say
“I don’t know” when the father asks what its name will be.
The boy is not there.

*

The father lets Iono coil three times around
the little girl’s unsuspicious neck.
Her body tightens.

*

I lay in bed with a hand on my belly.
Iono’s glass tank is in my bedroom.
There are no children.

*

The little girl is mine.
Iono is somewhere, hungry again.
I knead my stomach with a fist.

*

The boy hasn’t been born.
Iono stalks the mouse,
belly pushing sawdust
in that terribly long glass house.

*

I am in another goddamn bed.
I begin to knead again.
Iono has escaped.
I press down hard.

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Listen

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Maegan Gonzales is an interdisciplinary southern artist, writer, certified yoga instructor, and educator living in southwest Louisiana. Her poem, “Portrait of Complicity,” won the 2025 Editor’s Prize from Sundog Lit, and her writing has recently appeared in Bear Review, Sprung Formal, and more. She teaches composition and literature at McNeese State University, performs locally with her community theatre, and offers Yoga Under the Oak at Imperial Calcasieu Museum.