Justin Groppuso-Cook

SELF-PORTRAIT AS PEACOCK

Peacocks eat poisonous snakes unharmed, which led to the belief
that they convert the venom into the iridescence of their plumes.

For a thousand days I ate nothing. Then a snake.
Then two. Swallowed them

still alive. Ate more
& more enraptured in the taste. Like a drug

their bodies occupied my body,

coiled; I dragged myself through
perpetual war. Their fangs

sunk into my sacrum, the venom a delicacy

that rose into my brow—feathers shed
achromatic. Gave them

to the Churning of this Ocean of Milk,
the widening world.

Grew out my hair. Dyed

the curls with the toxin, a tonic. Blue-necked:
dressed up my abuse in paisley,

my lashes in a thick purple glitter. Electricity

tickled my hips, surged to the furthest
reaches of my extremities—

the charmer caught in a fever of lust. Curled
my coccyx, dug my toes

into the earth: I understood balance as a blade

of grass. My ribs quivered like wind
chimes as my mouth emptied with the molt

of every snake intertwined into an amulet.
This amulet I planted between

my temples a crown.