Don’t Tread on Me — Prince Bush
Among cacti and scorching sun of struggle,
Your tongue’s supple set of muscles,
Papillae, slightly white matt springs
Up from underneath—all this work
To mumble the wrong thing—a rattlesnake,
Courageous with venom, hisses. I skewer
The choanal slit and glottis, my right-
And left-wing distractions, poison
Leaking down my Red-tailed-Hawk beak,
Claws clutching the plate of the snake’s
Small head; I snatched your license plate
With my bare, black talons, as a matter of fact,
I searched the whole parking lot after, still
Peckish and piggish. The Red-tailed Hawk
Has excellent eyesight, ergo I left with five
Metal slabs of yellow rust—hunting so much
With a raspy, screeching call to find more.
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Prince Bush is a poet in Nashville, TN with poetry in Cincinnati Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pleiades: Literature in Context, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. He was a 2019 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets Fellow.