Ariadne Slays the Minotaur
i. land
Sometimes when I descend the stairs, I carry sugar cubes in my
sweating palms and barely escape with blood on my knuckles.
I used to go down to the darkness believing I was alone,
wearing the dress of my oldest self, hung from a braid of
silk rope around my neck, flat breasts exposed, skirt too
too long, knees clumsy among the folds. Foot-feeling along
the stones, I sat and gathered threads of wire like lint from the
floor, winding them into featherweight balls and pausing,
uncertain, when his warm breath arrived at the back of my neck–
the almost-silent, short, sharp sniffing, and then the crash of
exhalation pushed me back up the steps where I saw in the light
that the thread was golden. I softened it on the sun-hot patio,
shaped it into leaves I could wear in the tangles of my oiled hair.
Now I knew there was night in the daylight and I knew what
waited there, I went willingly, unable to abandon the one
who would not abandon me. Until the morning I grew
tall enough to wonder what was beyond the sea, woke
thirsty and drank the potion, not knowing I swallowed a
father and his liquid ancestry was poison. With that thirst-worn
mistake on my breath, the rest of my dreams were about how easy
escape could be, a promise snatched up in the teeth of
simplicity. Back down to the bottom I went, and this time
I wore a man’s body, stretched the length of my arms in his
freshly stitched sleeves and pulled the wire-bent pins from every
seam until my weapon gleamed back in the gold-flecked mirror
of the minotaur’s full-moon eyes. One of us died.
ii. water
I wake smaller and smaller, floating in a circular motion,
bound by a rope around my wrist, coughing onto the leather-clad
ribs of the thing that holds me. I open my eyes to the sting of
saltwater, my toes the size of spores clinging to the sea-leaf
that caught and carried me. I wake full-bodied
as the boat arrives in a city, my lover beside me. Late
at night, when he rolls on top of me, I find him light as
an empty spindle, limbs made of straw, flame of the bedside
candle newly frightening. I wake panting, drenched skirt
wrapped like pants around each leg, feeling the skin of
my thighs run together as the sun dries them free.
I wake believing I’ll remember the song in my dreams,
take up a stick in the sand to record the melody and
where I write the word cure, a cursor beats,
asking if I meant for an s between the r and the e?
I wake again in my body, golden thread discarded
like seaweed on the sand, coiled like
loosened handcuffs without a key.
I wake having not decided on death,
though death had come to me.
iii. land
Even what haunts us
has been our companion.
I have been prescribed
an antidepressant,
still in the dark of the labyrinth,
returned to capture an immortal
thread: the courage to speak.
We are tricked
by old stories that
man must be one way and
woman another. I have
gone so far as to
murder my half
brother. Now I’ve found
on this island a cave with
a steep descent, and tomorrow
I intend to go down in it
because the way out is
through the labyrinth
and I’ve choked on knots
before but a girl can
survive on loose ends.
published in New Plains Review, Fall 2022