and sliced her face. She fell screaming
as abrupt vines broke through the tiles
and plugged the doorless portal and stopped
any other slaves from intervening.
The new god sprung on the slave’s neck
and suckled her crease. The king arrived
and ordered his men to remove the vines,
but with blood plumping his papyrus sinews,
the god grew bigger than the girl who conceived him.
He drained the slave to a desiccant pulp.
He didn’t know gods drink nothing but nectar.
Scylla had forgotten to give him a name.
Immune to prayer, he asked the princess
why she conceived him. Scylla knelt:
I want Megara’s main gate to fall.
Grapevines thrust through the gate’s timbers
and flossed the hinges, freeing the nails.
The door fell forward, and the bar bounced free.
The citizens’ screams surpassed
the door’s collapse in loudness. The king
approached the gate grinning and pointed
at his purple lock. If he’d looked backward,
Nisos would have seen the new god clutching
his daughter’s knife. He didn’t know gods
don’t need weapons. Nisos yielded
his scalp the moment Minos blackened
the threshold and squared a throbbing triptych:
the two-headed monster twirling purple;
the wrinkled redhead rouging the dust;
the sunburned girl gazing on Minos.