The Man of War

He said I locked him in the car while I was inside the See’s candy pop-up store. Outside

watercolored oxen wheeled around me like the striking Triremes of Greece.

The Trojan Horse of voices bellowed,

Your problem is you lack ambition. He hitched his shoulders proudly. I looked up into the

rearview mirror. His Christmas present sat in the back.

I thought about the course of life and how apologetic I had to be. Speaking likenesses as a stenographer or a remote transcriber. I was the dead end to his research on the family tree. I wanted to kill the myth—and I did.

Unsewn patterns of fabric-keens. Un-strummed admissions from emissaries, a thinning ring with no proposal, a labyrinth of past tenses. My prematurely knotted fingers lightly untied themselves from the steering wheel. The problem was this. My uterus went hysterical and had to be removed.

No one was going to pull me out of Sparta, now.

As the colors outside swung by…everything sank into an overly painted sludge. I wished for Stein’s America where language and I were reintroduced as strangers. Of Loy’s manifesto fighting against the scorn of woman, and of Whitman’s unconscious yearnings for a dead father so he could finally sing of being unclothed.

Instead, I’m being compared like an orange against the meat and miscellaneous market. A captivus on the man of war. My next words were a hand to the horn.

…the pressure behind the horn gained and forged a history on every side of the sedan where olympian wings heaved the final edict.

The fall of Troy commenced at the flight of Zeus and not at the flight of Paris.

Clburdett, 2024