by Roxanne Broda-Blake
Manticore
the swaggerhound, laced in rusty sweat
slathers out the story
of the manticore’s destruction
her dead eternal teeth clatter against his
fulgid ginger chesthair
they samsoning it silently
rows of young mewlings
gaze up at him nudely
small downy penises lapping the dust floor
they sit with budding rubber legs folded
and gasp at his hands miming
her magenta blood shower
these youngling bloodbabies
so swallowed by visions of their glory-gory
future
their turgid eyes miss the hard black
section of calf
the wound hot and gasping for new skin
this debit she chews
sitting sphinxy content
eavesdropping with her keen red-tufted
ears
a spit-smoking shark turns outside the hut
she tilts her feline face upward to sniff
a pity, the meat will be so
overdone
Cassandra
The sun
tried to give me permission
“to be a dark thing.”
In his effulgent hands outfolding
I saw supplicance.
His sight sought voidance.
I took his eyes because his bright head
grew too large to trap them.
I fled to Troy and burned it down
with my fresh lazer face.
Elysium’s more flammable corners
are looking vulnerable.
I defied the sun and I deify gravity.
Agamemnon’s sex dungeon makes
me an iridescent moth, shining stake between my breasts.
A tireless capture, dedicated and delicately still.
I’ll make you cum so hard you’re powerless to shut your eyes –
the Last Mistake of the conquesting King.
I feel the moon rise beyond my crisp coal eyes.
She whispers that the First Witch will cast me to ashes
and I’ll the First Dragon.
I hoard prophecy like gold
the flicker of flint in my scales.
Agammemnon coats me in tinder blindly.
Revenge the Witch is closer now
carrying the match.
Sisters
I spent summers a young panther.
My bones cramped themselves thick
girding steel snakes up my calves.
We feel a thick moss, we mash
our feet into paws, so tensed
by youthful humors.
She was so small growing up
that rabbitflesh you feel
lurking elusive far below the fur
made clear and bright and girlchild-
shaped.
Our long bones later trunking out
Amazonian –
cloudy, cloying, clammy –
and ubermutant feline, lupine,
respectively.
Galloping,
we flustered the woods
and emerged
with our shins banded red.
Roxanne Broda-Blake is a bread-baking, coffee-slinging, weight-lifting winter creature in Upstate New York, where she lives with her cat and boyfriend. She runs a poetry blog called Mossly Log with her two best friends.
