CNF: They Pulled a 17 Ft Python Out of Big Cypress National Preserve
by Christen Noel Kauffman
Show me the belly of the swamp, how they pull her over crawfish mounds and the neckbone of a deer. Everyone watches her body stretched head to tip – marvels at the length of her spine and the gape of her jaw unhinged. They open her up to see what grows inside, count the seventy-three eggs she carried over mangrove roots, arthritic fingers holding the river in. When they say she’s gone, I imagine her coiled around the body of an egret, a perfect spiral tucked in the shallow stream. I pretend extraction means reborn in an Asian marsh. That her incisions have been pieced back together with a horsetail thread. See how her children have all hatched clean, their bellies filled with bouquets of white down.
Christen Noel Kauffman lives in Richmond, Indiana with her husband and two wild daughters. Her work can be found in journals such as Cherry Tree, Booth, Willow Springs, The Cincinnati Review. DIAGRAM, and The Normal School, among others.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “They Pulled a 17 Ft Python Out of Big Cypress National Preserve”? I wrote this flash nonfiction piece while working on a chapbook manuscript about the difficulties of new motherhood during the first couple of months after having my second daughter. I kept coming back to mothers in nature and climate change and this idea of taking care of children in a world that’s out of our control. I remember reading an article where scientists pulled this enormous snake out of the Florida swamp and the details of inspecting her body and counting her eggs and there was a connection in that. I felt for this snake and her children that would never hatch. This piece emerged as a way for me to imagine a better ending for her, and in many ways hoping for a happy ending for myself after postpartum. Other than a few minor changes, this piece has stayed very close to how I wrote it that first afternoon, holding a baby that wouldn’t sleep consistently until many, many months later.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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