Liz Beasley

Liz Beasley earned her M.F.A. at Bowling Green State. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Passages North, among other magazines. She was awarded a Richard Devine fellowship in the summer of 2000.

Snakeskin

Clouds thin into form: a hawk

pulling a tail of rings—beads

of an abacus, the mathematics

of light—a lengthening spine,

snakeskin no longer inhabited.

All day I'm giving a name

for what isn't there. Yet somewhere

we've left our likeness, the hollow

shapes of us. Even though the snake

has slipped into the shade,

the shed skin, deceptively whole,

hidden in the sun-flecked grass,

remembers what it once held.

— Liz Beasley