Clara Bush Vadala: PARTHENOGENESIS • Cleaver Magazine

Clara Bush Vadala
PARTHENOGENESIS
Sonnet Crown

for Anna the anaconda from Boston’s New England Aquarium, 2019

Her unborn litter will find it very hard
to come undone because their mother did
not for anyone either. When she heard
indecence she undid her mouth and spit

a forked utensil from her throat: her tongue.
The snake maneuver saves her, saves the sex
for pleasure, not for procreation. Hung
up, she wonders, bearing all these complex

internal wigglings, should she release them?

She clones herself like a bacterium;
Instead of letting testes spill inside
her organs, she creates the tissues sperm
is spread from. She manipulates, inside

herself, her reproductive nature. Now,
with nothing but her choice, she practices,
hermaphroditic as amoeba. Now,
this is what it means to be adaptive:

A constellation slithers in me, aches,

The process is sacred, the things she makes
are pregnant with a knowing—do you think
the consciousness of each offspring is the same
as the mother’s? If one slithers, do they all kink

in unison? The collective of snake
is nest, pit, knot, or a bed made and laid
in, scales all tangled up in other snakes.
These pits hive mind. Perform a kind of play

we aren’t privy to. It is dark and hard

to find the pit of snakes; this is the part
we live for. We allow the teeth we feel
to start their slendering into fangs, part
the cleft below our nose to swallow, reel

back, retrograde our necks to make a sound
like hissing, gasp. We listen like our heads
have holes, for heat, for intensity. Bound
inside the pit of ourselves, we are dead

before we realize we’re dying. Then, calm.

Some snakes have lost their heads attempting calm
and losing the attempt. I’ve seen it happen,
I’ve seen the serpent, frantic as she drowns—
A zoo enclosure’s pool display has penned

her underneath a waterfall that twists
and flips the little snake. It makes her look
unhinged. Her accidental fall, the kiss
of death. I watch the snake and I am hooked,

My hand presses against the plexiglass,

the only audience her dying has.
The beginning of it is hard to name,
let’s call it phobia, call it too fast,
let’s say an instinct that I have to tame.

Her desperate coil is a call for help, the curl
of vertebrae a sign that a dive beneath
the waves is imminent. She drowns. Her turns
are painful, hard to watch, slower, she sinks.

It comes to mind that anacondas lose

their young, the ones the mother snakes from her
as clones, the ones she made from nothing, ones
that slink inside her body, long, quicker
and quicker, climb down her hundred rib bones,

viviparous, they call her, bearing live
the babies she’s created. They all squirm
at first, but each new day, another dies.
No matter from which genes they might emerge,

almost all of them will die, these parts of her.

Clara Bush Vadala is a poet and veterinarian from Van Alstyne, TX. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apricot Press, The Madrigal, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among other places. Her chapbook, Book of Altars, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in 2024 and her full-length poetry collection, Resembling a Wild Animal, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in 2024.