Apollo and Marsyas Go. Go before I change my mind, Is all He would have thought, and said, If not for the great glee He heard In how Marsyas gripped and played The thin, twig-tied pipes for the Lord Of Light, Prince of Gods, Apollo, The Core Verse incarnate, Father… Read more
Reverse Orpheus And saw his own death happen. But as a mending this time, a cleaning. They shoved his limbs together, Flailed off all the blood, Then dimmed into the distance Like the dots of an ellipsis. The shattered boulders rebounded, Rolled back up their ruts. The sea’s sea-lathered… Read more
They brandished their births like spears. Being there wasn’t enough. Their names Needed their fathers and their cities And their spears and the red air of Ilium. There’s Apisaon lying on his liver As it curdles and leaks out rib-mangled From his wound like a clicking tongue In froth,… Read more
A translation of Nonnus, Dionysiaca 16.244–364 Content notification: God Dionysus, enamored with the nymph Nikaia, drugs her with river water transformed into wine and rapes her in her inebriated sleep. The Dryad, having mocked the god, slipped back into her tree. But Dionysus ardently pursued the maiden; he Was passionate from… Read more
The soul of swift-soled Achilles, hearing me Praise his son, silvered, and then was gone, His long strides causing him to blend, light–bent, Into the shining, maize-meadow cloudbank Shadowed by that one solitary tree It takes sixteen years for light, let alone A soul, to cross. The other dead, who… Read more
In the first version of the story, Odysseus, son of Laertes, struggles home after ten years at sea, having lost all his men (the fools). But in a second version of the story, Odysseus leaves, and takes his men with him—“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—to… Read more
