by Charlotte Hughes
*please click on title to see the poem in its proper format
I do believe that an arrow unsung still does its own kind of singing
by singing I mean sorrow and by sorrow I mean the kind of perdition
& limbo you saw from the temple walls, the kind that knocks outside
your brass & teakwood door saying love-lost, honor-country, duty-glory, and when
you open the door it wedges its foot in the crack & won’t be
on its way until you’re on your knees speaking Aeolic to the marble &
I’m on my Persian carpet furiously solving SAT math problems
to keep from crying. One part of me would look at the lot of us, the crying
groundlings, wouldn’t even think of pity—no that’s you who
cannot hear the sound of a plastic bag whipped in the interstate wind, who
cannot switch the channel to the news with a dry face—you are yourself
& the reason not even your mother & father will believe when you prophesize
that the Trojan Horse whispers in Attic & when a wooden panel is screwed
loose there will be an outline of an eye in the belly of the horse.
The other part of me would be absolutely wretched.
I would consider myself ungraspable like the wind, I would throw
my shoes in a heap in one corner of the temple,
run with Cassandra on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea until the sand
caught my feet & I came down headfirst on charred sand,
& at 2 AM on the shore I would drop my chiton run
into the sea like Aphrodite except this time I wouldn’t be carried
out of the water on a conch-shell pedestal but would lurch out howling &
baying with Cassandra. & I would leave apples & oranges & a tub
of water outside the temple for anyone and call that resistance.
Look, I care imperfectly & Cassandra would care imperfectly
but still I carve my fingers clean & make a silly girl out of
myself at family gatherings, just like when Cassandra told Troy to stop
with it already & her family thought they’d better take
the mulled wine away. I even make little sacrifices out of my USAA card &
the time I have left. I stay up far past a girl’s bedtime. But speaking of
sacrifices, I keep circling back to this one: Cassandra snoring on the persimmon
mosaic of the temple. Myrrh. Anise. Anti-shadows of snakes
stretching around Cassandra’s earlobes, lacing through locks of apricot hair,
flicking tongues in her ears while whispering that she’ll have prophecies
no one will believe. She tried to wake up from the dream
but her eyes were already open.
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