Family Solo

    KLYTAIMESTRA:

In prayerful, rational geometry

his arrow arced

but just—a kill—
through heaven’s rolled, impersonal blue,

arriving beyond view
before the thought of it.

The deer kicked without purchase
in the air
so, the further out she ran,
she laid right there

before he raised a pole

a little taller

than a daughter
on a pile of oiled wood
might stand.
            
               •

    KLYTAIMESTRA:

On his cup
the murex —

a spiny conch
as if within the rib complex
of some dissolved

creature
new proprietors
built a calcite beehive tomb

captured in Syrian ivory
and Caucasian tin
that touches between his eyes

each sip axe glint

as naval ships
that lamplight sails
approach the bath

gridded, grouted, fit.

Whose legs submerged waste?

What man’s penis refracted to a boy’s wavers

and in creases of lapped water
winks away?

His own?

Or is he meant to be on board
and then myself in Mycenae

on the outer room’s pisé walls
he storms
décor.

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“In the aftermath of the 2016 election, I was, like many of us, distraught, feeling defeated, and scared. When a friend reminded me of this story sometime after reading Robyn Schiff’s very excellent ‘A Doe Replaces Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar’ in Poetry, thinking of Clytemnestra fighting back felt good. What do I have to fight with? My body, my vote, my classroom, and my writing too, among other things. The core thought of the poem might be something like: use what you have, if you can, when you can.”
—Eric Ekstrand