Nailah
17
Athena in Death
i. There is a sculpture.
ii. I am more awake than I am alive.
iii. I have only ever met one woman with grey eyes.
iv. The days are muggy and soft. Stepping outside is like being thrown under a blanket, freshly stifled with warm breath. Breezes are blessed. The sun does not bake as much as it warms us – slowly so very slowly. Everything is in transit.
v. Athena in Death is captivating. She rises on the knee left unweakened, alabaster fingers still clutching her spear. Arrowheads plucked from her breast beg for forgiveness at her sandaled feet. There they pay their penance.
vi. I have been left alone.
vii. The wary morning slips off her robe and now wears a blistering day. I run into the coppering afternoon. Launch myself into the red brick street. I am as awake as I am alive.
viii. She does not ask for an apology nor is she apologetic. She is wise. This death will not last.
ix. Her owl looks on from its perch on her discarded shield.
x. She has taken a different form.
xi. So will I.
xii. So will you.
xiii. Sweat forms in pearls on my back – we breathe from the deepest parts of our lungs. I am unafraid in the day.
xiv. She is with me.
xv. Athena was a man with a woman’s shape. But when Paris loved not her beauty but Aphrodite’s, she was fabulous in her rage. Can men not be vain? Can women not be ferocious?
Icarus in Love
xvi. You lay in wait for an exquisite pain.
xvii. We wear our hearts in our eyelashes tilt our heads back slide open our jaws and devour the light or do we drown in it.
xviii. Icarus in street clothes sits alone his face decorated with burn scars hidden in his hoodie. He stares at the sun on a parking garage rooftop and weeps for he will never come so close again. Yet still he stares.
xix. You have no waxpaper wings.
xx. The clouds shift change direction, and there, a dusky yellow hipbone. A morning blue breast. The copper brick church strains to touch her again.
xxi. My body is no wonderland. The heat sloughs off my skin – I bleed light and truth and cranberry juice My veins pump flames do not touch me in love or in fear – you will be burned.
xxii. His father does not know how to bring him home.
xxiii. Icarus in Love is a man begging to be blind but his lover would sooner spit in his eyes than take them away.
xxiv. Art imitates life imitating art imitating life. And we are not alive.
xxv. She wraps herself in a shimmering black veil. My hands are flecked with stars of powdered sugar. Your mouth still tastes like rum.
xxvi. I am not the sun.
