nothing like Scylla, who first scuttled around
one of her father’s greaves, then climbed a gore
to reach a breastplate he’d never worn before.
Ready to defend him come what may,
she clicked his bronze. She should’ve crawled away,
but felt a loyalty to him whose cause
her shrunken memory had shed. Her claws
pinched a royal finger by accident—
a shock of sore surprise, a small red rent,
that spun the king, who cracked the shell against
the breastplate of the nearest guard. He sensed
he’d made an irreversible mistake:
the guard saw shards of Scylla’s chitin flake
his master’s beard and green tomalley taint
his tears. The king had muttered no complaint
through months of siege, but now he howled pure woe:
How could you make a princess undergo
such a disgrace? Ares, were you sleeping
in Morpho’s lap when your cruel peers were heaping
agonies on your son, or did you play
along with them? How else could she betray
her father? She had reasons—what they were—
now I’ll never know. Perhaps I insulted her
with our boisterous symposia. Perhaps
the Muses mined her for our gate’s collapse.
Ares, show some kindness to a wrecked king.
Ares, unsplatter this much-splattered thing!
The filicide fell, staunching his prayer
in sand, but Ares failed him. The gods don’t care.
Nisos pounded Minos with his brittle
fists till his boyfriends lugged him home. A little
pyre melted Scylla’s scrapings. The ash,
dispatched to Athens, joined the sepulchral trash
in their ancestral tomb. But Minos stayed
unburnt above ground, where his limbs decayed
with no rites but the blowflies’ drone.
The almost overthrower now overthrown,
Nisos pondered what to do with him:
It’s hard to imagine even death will slim
this orb of shit! How could they load enough
oxen on those narrow boats to stuff
this raider’s belly through the siege? His guts
are all the spoils that fall to us, so what’s
the worse that we can do to them, my boys?
Sophia, master of the old king’s joys,
advised him: Handle his corpse decently
though with the minimum of majesty.
Don’t leave him here to rot, and don’t abuse
his nasty flesh. Remember: any bruise
his father finds could bring us untold pain.