The Future’s Revenge on the Past

Calliope, still young, gazed across the charbroiled night sky.

Constellations moulted before her eyes, as ages passed by.

Her namesake: a muse; foretold in hidden verse her future–

She saw it in a dream– Calliope would be forsaken by her very own suitor.

Calliope gazed across the cerulean sea, years later.

Her stomach swelled with salt water,

In her arms, her newborn child stopped seething.

Then her sweet daughter stopped breathing.

Calliope nearly died.

She cried.

cried

And cried

cried

And cried

cried

And cried

Until the salt water in her stomach flooded the shore,

Flooded the hillocks, until she promised the moon, oh she swore

Upon the river below that she would never let this betrayal

Go. She would avenge her daughter, and it would be fatal.

She cursed her forebear. She screamed that magpies

Would be the least of her worries, that all they would do is take her eyes. (She would do much worse.)

She challenged the Fates to stop her. “Snip my yarn!” she taunted，

“I will follow the immortals below. I don’t care if you’re alive, Calliope. You will be haunted!

“You foresaw my downfall, you knew I would be swept up in the current.

You did nothing to stop Poseidon, and now I’m no longer a parent.

Everything that could have been prevented, you kept unseen.

Now I learn that even before I was born, you saw it in a dream?”

She cursed her forbear, but thought nothing of the man

Who impregnated her. Who, with naught but the push of his hand

Sent her into the seas to drown with his own child in tow.

She said nothing of him because she knew it would be so.

Even without a dream-sent warning from the muse with her name,

Calliope knew that the man wasn’t even close to sane.

She saw it in his eyes as he pushed her against the marble.

She smelled it on his breath, something much stronger than cordial.

So all her untethered rage was sent to Calliope:

The wisest, the one the other muses look towards lovingly.

Calliope regretted the death of the child,

But the Fates consoled her: “This is how her destiny was filed.”

Calliope sent Zephyr, the mild western breeze,

To dry the tears from her younger versions' sleeves.

She sent hummingbirds towing flowers ripe with nectar

To cure the pain of the young mothers robbery after her third trimester.

But all this Calliope ignored.

It seemed that of her pain, she did not wish to be cured.

After all, it was the only thing that kept her going;

Without revenge, she said, she would be nothing.