Laura Schulkind Featured 10/13

10/13/14 Laura Schulkind hosted by Odilia

Poet and writer Laura Schulkind is an attorney by day, where she is entrusted with others’ stories. Through fiction and poetry she tells her own. She and her husband divide their time between Berkeley and Big Sur California, and her two grown sons continue to inspire her. Her published work can be seen atwww.lauraschulkind.com

Snake and Toad

(Forge Journal, Fall 2012)

Braided into the scrub brush,

I saw them,

snake and toad,

black garter slender as my beckoning finger,

except for its bulging jaw     

stretched madly around half the toad,

head already gone,

belly the blue-white of fern tendrils still curled underground,

motionless except for the ripple of skin 

stretched thin across its still-beating heart.