should touch Minos. The maggot party
raved in a ring of Megaran guards.
Though the reek couldn’t reach the city,
Sophia feared infection. While Nisos
snored, his beloved left his chambers,
gathered incense, oil, and an obol,
and approached Minos, and implored the guards:
We need to burn this body now!
I can hardly believe his sublime father
hasn’t already razed Megara
or, worse, cursed us with a wasting plague.
Consider your wives, your sons and daughters:
they might turn to ash any moment.
It’s dangerous to disobey
a king, I know, but Nisos will spare you.
I’ll take the blame. Let’s burn this body!
Then laughter riled the royal prosthesis,
and the guards taunted Megara’s savior:
Will you take the blame, like you take his dusty
fuck in your mouth, before or after
you’ve licked his asshole? They laughed harder
when Moros spilled his spear and chased
Sophia, who bounded, unburdened by armor,
up Nisaia’s slopes. Safe from Moros,
he prayed to Zeus and the poppy goddess
to spare Megara despite the king’s
foolish neglect. Sophia needed
to sacrifice but found no beasts
or fruit to offer, so he fused his blood
and seed on stone. Sunrise greeted
a gull-party and gleamed blank
on Cretan bones. A cloud shortage
didn’t stop the lightning from relaxing Megara’s
walls and playing a white chord
on Apollo’s tower. The people atoned
for Nisos, whose ashes united with theirs.
But Demeter transformed Sophia, the last
Megaran: his voice veered toward treble,
and her breasts tapered as her bliss scalloped.
She became a priestess of the poppy-goddess,
and waited on Nisaia, watching the sea,
against renewal, a northward sail.