Persephone

I. Demeter

Torches, with torches the goddess sprinted 'round the globe.

The mountain ranges shuddered in the face of her wrath.

The terrible voice of the Mother echoed and fruit fell from

branches and young olive trees grew ancient within minutes.

No man in the bloody heat of war ever felt rage as Hers.

Mighty Achilles fell as a lamb before her savage gaze.

The wall of Ajax slid into the sand. The land was wasted

and the memory of forests was transmuted into stone.

II.

Her face was flushed and the four fingers of his right hand

clawed without fingernails into the hair behind her head. He pulled

so that Persephone's bright eyes could see only the ceiling.

The middle finger of his left hand traced from her navel up, up, up,

until two inches below her chin and then grasped with

every tendon, his forefinger massaging the top of her spine.

His lips met upon her shoulder and she shivered and screamed.

After fifteen writhing moments he released her and stretched his arms

behind his head, a small scar on his forearm catching the candlelight.

III.

She rolled over and bit into a pomegranate seed, a thin bloody river

curving to her collar. She took his hand and said, "My love, I cannot

bear to have you again depart." She sighed and stood. Her face changed

and no empress ever had such an steeled stare. Her hair billowed

like a jungle set aflame. It roiled in the flickering night.

She suddenly reached beneath the bed. In her hands

there were gnarled shears and her hair fell in torrents

and the floor was flooded in despair.

IV.

With Persephone's slashed treasure tucked into a pouch,

Adonis trudged with weary muscles past the slavering

guardian of the dead's land. The brightness of the sun bit at his eyes

and the treacherous one giggled like a brook. She purred.

"Ah, my pet, you have found something, have you not?"

He squared his shoulders and said, "Goddess from the sea,

I have heard your promises like the rain upon the surf.

I have done what was required. She has broken the renewal.

She has shorn the promise of a shuttered frost.

Where then is your ugly husband's forge?

Let us bind her locks within a dagger's edge, let us

fashion a blade upon the anvil of all storms,

and then I shall descend again to the underworld

and with a weapon of her own body paint a picture

and be as Perseus with that dishonored Gorgon of the deep."

She laughed prettily, like the first taste of honey after the snow.

"My handsome love, you do despise her after all! Her brooding

features so inferior to mine, to think that she fancies you her own,

as if any man would prefer the nightshade to the opened lily.

"The smithing will be the work of a moment. Darling," she said,

her tongue flicking against his earlobe, "however did you convince

the dark lady to give to you such power? Oh, your body in the lamplight

is a crafter of legends, and when you speak of beauty

the very birds cease their song, but this, how this?"

Adonis chuckled and stared out at the horizon. "I kissed her on the mouth,"

he said, "and afterward she could never have been anything but mine.

"Hand to me this blade the Fates would fear, and soon you and I shall

never need to leave this glade. We will build towers and fill them

with the stories of our lives and all alive will strain for the echoes

of our voices."

Aphrodite handed him an immortal's bane. Bold Adonis pursed his lips

and wove his body like leaves in the wind. Like a tiger roused

from a dream he leapt. Blood pulsed in a bead

smaller than a needle's prick upon her cheek. "Oh," the foam-born

moaned. "Adonis, my dove, I would have made of you a king."

In an instant she could no longer bend the light

and in a mirage she rippled.

V.

Her hair spun like ivy around her.

She smiled like wolves smile.

She drank from a jar of wine, coughed, and tossed the jar

into the furnace. The clay cracked in two calm lines.

"My husband," she said. "My husband, it seems that the time

has arrived for you to make an accounting to your blushing bride."

He sat with a body covered in scars. Black Hades, horror of the Earth,

thief eternal, lifted his head and began to speak. No speech emerged,

for the steel whistled and Atlas bore no weight

and the boulder of accursed Sisyphus hung on a thread

and the head of the dark lord rolled bloodless on the bricks.

VI.

The moon grew close to the earth and heresies rustled

through the leaves of trees. It was rumored that the lord of the dead

had been slain. People milled in careful celebrations.

Women ragged with age slowly reverted to the rose of youth.

Men long crippled danced to the tune of unheard drinking songs.

The flowers that newlyweds planted in neat rows wilted.

Men reaching for an impassioned lover withered.

Laughing children broke to dust.

The sky, once blue like the ocean's eyes,

smoldered into the slate of a mausoleum.

Adonis kissed Persephone upon a throne of weathered bone.

Fragments 6

Even our bombs leave trails of fire as they fly

with their lips chapped by the drought in the air.

It must be a most curious unfeeling to be killed

by a man or woman as faceless as destiny.

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death's inevitable dark cheekbones

like a knot in the trunk of a tree

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A blush of rose fell in dust and settled onto porcelain.

Canisters of indeterminable origin were arrayed in thoughtless ways

like the compliments a pretty girl receives when wearing a sundress.

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midnight, make my heart your color

that I may rise above the jungle's canopy,

let the knife clenched between my teeth stay sharp

if it should happen that I meet a god as I go upon my path

Adyebo

I.

Her voice did not waver as she raised the forefinger

of her left hand and said, "My mother was taken

and then murdered before my eyes before I was thirteen.

I was sold among rebel commanders for nearly six years.

I have borne eleven children and lived through three civil wars

with both my hands still on my arms

and you will not stand in my way."

The young man pulled both lips between his teeth,

flexed his jaw, and stood to the left of a windowless steel door.

She pushed the door open. The floor was stained

with the black of old blood.

On a concrete table in the center of the room, flies

spun excitedly above a sheet that had been woven

with beige cloth but was now a supple fabric

of dripping sandstone.

Leading with her right foot, she took four steps

and pulled the sheet up by a corner and exposed

the bruised, livid feet of a tall man.

II.

His right cheekbone was pulp and the kinks of his hair

were holding his brain close to his head. The flies sprinted

on ravenous quests and they were permitted.

What more could be done?

His lips were gone and his face was split in a terrible yawn.

His ribs rose like quills or the spines of mountains through the skin

of his sides. His right knee was bent in a grotesque way, connected only

by one large ligament as if it had been torn by a medieval rack

and everywhere the blood had hardened.

His throat was cut and he had been castrated. In a grin red as a wave,

only six teeth, all molars, were visible. Hunks of his skull were missing

as if someone had been idly pulling pieces of bread from a round loaf.

One eye hung by nerves and veins but its color was impossible to discern.

"Eggplant, eggplant," she whispered, slow as the spring.

"If they have done this, why not bake him too?"

III.

She strode from the morgue. Eyes closed, she inhaled deeply

and for a moment the room was a meadow

and there were no men with uniforms

and no future years of keening the dead, and he was still

forgetting to rinse his mouth with peroxide after eating corn.

She opened her eyes and said without emotion,

"Yes, he is of my body."

She walked out of the building quickly, leaving her relatives

to show the policemen the identification card of Joseph Adyebo,

aged twenty three years, bludgeoned to his death after being found

in the bed of a rich man's son.

Fragments 5

Each morning on our doorstep, flower petals

are arrayed in prayerful patterns. We dispassionately

brush them aside as we walk (her feet soft in moccasins)

until the day's newspaper is found.

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tradition perishes slower than the sun

or else is extinguished in an instant,

more fragile than a firefly

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A soldier walks past storefronts on pristine brick sidewalks.

He is camouflaged so that he need not see himself

unless he is alone.

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a prison is more than locked bars at the door

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one day in the world's dark heart, the Christians

burned a little girl as a witch

while the devil licked his fingers

and played the world's smooth piano keys

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even if the only consequence of oppression

was the formation of group identity,

that alone would necessitate a march to equality

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even on afternoons where her song is a banshee's wail

and the windows shatter from missiles shaped as coffee cups,

I understand that whole villages would drink the dregs of death

if they could but share a minute's time with the divine

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after three weeks of finding himself buried alive,

he began to play himself in games of chess,

and even though he was held entirely captive from light

the pieces that he moved around no board were white and black

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unravel (as a wave gasping at the release of the shore)

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What characteristic of trees first made men fell

such towering giants to the earth?

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Goddess, tell me of chained misery,

for I know why you came from the sea

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for an age, men knew not that oceans possessed ends

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the sweat on her shoulders scattering

like marbles on a hardwood floor

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a poem about a painting is not very different

than a painting about a person

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Collapse, my love, as the grandest cliffs of granite

change to sand with the lapping of the tide,

for I have licked my fingers and rubbed the mortal source of light

into nothing. There will be no knocks against the door,

nor invaders peering into our haven. Sleep and be mine,

and when we wake the pyramids will be palm trees.

Sisyphus

I.

She told him that when she laughed her ears

turned to the color of apple peels, before stammering

that apples were sometimes yellow or green,

but that she had meant that her ears turned the color

of the peels of red apples, though perhaps that didn't matter either.

Arkady laughed and said, “Do not worry. I assure you

that there are more unpleasant ways to point out that a person is blind.”

They drank four bottles of wine and the lamps of the night faded to blue.

Her hair was the color that all things were

and the skin below her clavicle was crisp like apple peels were

sometimes. Six years passed with the dew and every star burned,

fury flooding across ancient seas that such a love was denied

to the flickering of dying candles and all the other gods.

One morning the sky was shaded like flame bitten trees

and she whispered to him as he sat clay-stained in a chair,

“You must not follow. Tomorrow morning, hanging from the mailbox

there will be a necklace. When the sun's wheel is hidden it will be gone.

Until a day comes that these two things happen differently,

you shall not see me again.”

II.

For twenty years, Arkady woke during mornings and walked

to a box he had never seen so that a chain of silver could be tarnished.

At night he wept like the roots below killing fields when his

frantic hands touched no surface save the cursed tin box-shell or walnut post.

He had stopped speaking to anyone except his village priest

until this recourse was denied him after a particularly virulent

hemorrhagic fever decimated the rural population and it was then

that hushed stories of the blind potter emerged. It was said

that he could craft wine-bowls that would disintegrate if the drinker

was a liar. It was said that he had fallen in love with a wraith. It was said

that he was an immortal who had sacrificed his first eye for the knowledge

of all things and who had later placed his second upon the altar in order to forget.

III.

It was a day in May and Arkady was forty-six years old. The path

clung to his sandals with the mud of three-day rains and he pressed the links

of the necklace to the curve of his jaw. After a moment he sat on the ground.

“Grandfather,” they said (his beard made lions surge with envy and it was

white with clay). “Grandfather, can something be done?” He sat silent.

He wrapped the necklace around his craftsman's wrist.

Arkady did not move and the next morning they said again, “Grandfather,

can something be done?” The next morning they pleaded with him (his skin sallow,

his urine dark brown and dribbling from his pants, the slim silver of her token

metallic in his mouth) to drink water from a spring, but he shook his head in reply.

On the third morning of his vigil he began to break his teeth in his madness. Before

night his heart broke entirely. They buried him in a simple coffin beneath

an apple tree high on a hill. Next to the headstone of Arkady, shaper of clay,

a monument pierced its way into the dungeons of the clouds. A bronze setting

proclaimed the name of the Tsarina Alexandra,

dead these twenty years from an outbreak of plague.

Rapping in the Snow

Cop rolls by and he’s nibbling on a sweet confection.

Streetlights flash in my eyes from every direction

And putting steel on my wrists is that pig’s obsession.

He can’t see me ‘cause the night is my soul’s protection.

I’d punch his mouth but he’s got a fucking Smith and Wesson.

That’s not all, just a taste of talent’s selection.

Son of Pan, immortal life without introspection,

Can’t talk ‘bout women since I am the picture of discretion,

But if you wonder who’s the greatest I’ll answer the question:

The bi girls say that I should give the lesbians lessons.

Cairo

Barbarous men with masks like men’s faces step heavily.
There is a peculiar tinge from the foreign sunset pooling with the dust
and it is remembered that gutters are not only for the rains.

There is terror in the air and the feet of the pursued are war drums
(pulse, pulse, the rumble of a slipping fault,
the shudder of foundation’s collapse, the suffocation
of a religious festival that sends too many to god).

They die and here it is winter. They die with ribs broken by batons
and because my toes are cold I wear socks with my slippers.