This Afterlife by A. E. Stallings

Author:A. E. Stallings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Art Monster

My mother fell for beauty,

Although it was another species,

Ox-eyed, dew-lapped, groomed for sacrifice.

She had to devise another self

To put her self in—something inhuman

Or beauty could not possess her—

(O daedal mechanics!)

She grew huge with hybridity,

Rumor-ripened. I was born

To be amazed.

She fascinated me with cat’s cradles,

Spun threads out of my hirsute

Hair shirt. I was fed

On raw youths and maidens,

When all I wanted was the cud of clover.

I was named after my step-

Father, dispenser of judgment,

No one called me my mother’s son.

Minotaur, they said, O Minotaur,

You are unnatural, grotesque.

A hero will come to slay you, a hero

Who jilts princesses on desert islands.

It is heroic to slay, to break a heart,

To solve the archaic puzzle in the basement,

De-monster the darkness.

I await this patiently, as I bow to the yoke

Of making, scratching this earliest of inscriptions

On a potsherd, down here in the midden,

Writing left to right, then right

To left, as a broken beast furrows a field.

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