courage. Their guest’s etiolated shode
divorced clear fluid while a darker flowed
beneath her chin. The open vowels ceased,
and Scylla’s womb interred the hostile yeast
a bit too premature to live outside.
The bard watched her belly’s throbs subside;
they did not need to use the knife again.
Weeping, they’d wait within their sanguine den
until night came and they could dig the grave
in peace. But this day, day did not behave
predictably: the afternoon contracted,
and Helios’s muffled orb refracted
before the poppies longed for nyctinasty.
Astraios broke the tawny owls’ fast. He
squat on the hovel, slid his mouth inside,
and fetched the kernel of infanticide
with charcoal teeth whose intrapartum polish
caught lunar blushes chance will not abolish.
A rage for oxygen, the fetus blazed
the instant it hit air. Astraios raised
his amplifying head, which cleared the roof
before the walls relaxed. A gray reproof,
a sizzling grandson, dangled from his teeth.
The bard began a sprint across the heath,
but when they turned to look back at the dusk
each eyeball fled its socket up a tusk
too small for goring, as their fingernails
coiled, and their clothes collapsed like becalmed sails
and their failed ears clenched the wind’s last drone
and their songs lost their hard-won baritone.
The way back home was now so long: their heart’s
desire rotted, and their new love darts
would never fly. Forgotten by their folk,
they nibbled lichen down their lyre’s yoke.