#sonya taaffe

[cithaerons]

Sonya Taaffe, Delenda

[hortensius]

Lucan in Averno

Inspired by Sonya Taaffe’s poem (text under the cut)

Lucan in Averno by Sonya Taaffe

Halfway off the path nobody keeps to,

the poet meets himself in Hades

like a creditor on the stairs, a started ghost

with a face of wet ashes and wrists hollow as wax

the stylus dug too deeply, emptying of words.

Scared, with a cynic’s grin, he holds out

a half-corrected scroll, laurels frozen in his hair

like hemlock. Is he whispering his name?

Am I whispering it for him?

So casually we practice this blasphemy,

raking up the dead, their rings and calcined bones.

My tongue between his teeth will speak

of Cato, Caesar, and a nameless soldier’s corpse,

my fingers follow Nero’s razor cuts.

The past will lead on, saying nothing more

than what it has already ceased to say.

[violettesiren]

Half her face is rotted grain. Through dry wheat withies, the daub and grate of her ribs, the pomegranate smolders, a red sun at the rim of a winter field. To kiss her is the spade's slice into grave-goods, the late earth scattering sockets, teeth, fibula pins. To slip into her is digging for poppies. She reaches in me for famine and the knife. We fall on the threshold in dying flowers and frozen dew, our faces laid together a single facade. You look at us and see two deaths entangled, but between us there is always room for you.

Persephone in Hel by Sonya Taaffe

[bloedgetuige]

Sonya Taaffe - id under cut

Ariadne in Queens

Step down from their soundstage, lady,

cut the lights, unmantle from the fog,

and tell me why you want to break your heart

between a hero and a hard place

when you could have a satyr?

The Met knows my credentials——

a red-figured lekythos

bright-eyed from the workshop of Hermonax

in the days of the Delian League,

only sometimes I knock a hat back over these sharp ears

and hitch some trousers over this horse’s ass

and take the night air

in this asphalt wildwood.

Lady, Andromache looked happier

eating the ash of Troy’s battleground,

Helen slowly taking up her weaving

at magnanimous Menelaos’ side.

The best wine-shop I drank in

burned with Peiraieus,

but I know a taverna on Ditmars

does a mean skordalia and a better tsipouro

and the nymphs of Astoria Park have seen it all.

I can put the vine-leaves back in your hair

in no time,

Dionysos’ gasp in your throat

and no regrets.

Take a cue from the theater,

even Euripides knew it——after tragedy,

the satyr play.

[catilinas]

Sonya Taaffe, Ghost Signs

[gwydionmisha]

Punic War IV - Sonya Taaffe

Is it all just Carthage 

over again, that foreign city 

you can raze to her children's bones

 while your own dedicate themselves 

to the funeral games of empire, 

striking poses in white marble 

polished highly as lies? 

Is it just the Crusades 

at seventy-two frames per second, 

a desert of soldiers 

with drones of righteousness, 

the dream of a rood like the teeth of a dog 

in the bone of a stranger's heart? 

Are you still prosecuting the war 

before the last war, the next war already encysted 

in our waving memories? 

How thin the snail's shell 

between Mars-red, Phoinix-porphyry. 

How fragile the footage 

—potsherds in the cloud— 

of our victory.

[displayheartcode]

spoilers in the tags!

[cithaerons]

Sonya Taaffe