Zeus Tries His Luck at Online Dating

by AliceApril 13, 2020April 13, 2020

Or: Even Ancient Deities Get the Blues

Will you save me the choicest bits of meat when you sacrifice a calf
Will you sacrifice your first born
Will you swear to remain a virgin
Or to become one
Do you speak in tongues when you speak in prophecies
Have you been a tree a bird a woman fleeing on foot
Have you turned into stone
If you had to choose a ravishing which would you choose
A swan a bull a cascade of coins
Hymen is the god of marriage
Will you obey us
Will you call us Father
Will you call us Daddy
Will you praise us
Will you praise us
Will you praise us
Will you call it love

~e. alice isak

[Quick note for station identification after the jump. Hope you’ll join me!]

The Gift

by AliceApril 8, 2020April 8, 2020

“Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?”
— Ovid, Metamorphoses

Disregard what poets tell you.
They hear the thump of their own hearts
and think they have discovered a universe.
Or presume that my beloved, musician to the gods
who never flubbed an entrance in his life,
might in eagerness miscount the beats remaining
to lift his wife back out of death.
Turn for me too soon, an accident.

You living march toward darkness
like a parade, joyous and cacophonous
and blind. Whereas I have already worn my shroud.
And I have already tasted ashes.
The sunlight you steep in cannot thaw bones
already chill with such fore-knowledge.

See the truth. In his final triumphant crescendo,
Orpheus heard a single word fall
from my mouth like a stone:

“Turn.”

And true love did.

~e alice isak

Medea Before the Argonauts

by AliceOctober 7, 2019October 7, 2019

Somewhere in a story, not yet knowing Jason’s name, Medea dreams of floating away across the wine-dark sea into adventure. Her brother’s dismemberment yet awaits her, and the scattering of his parts upon the ocean like torn bread tossed to ducks. Dragon-teeth remain unplanted, a father’s treasures unravished. Many years and many tales not-yet-told lay between her in this moment and the slaughtering of rivals with sartorial poison, the kebab’ing of sons on barbeque skewers to serve at their father’s remarriage feast.

Do you believe for one moment she dreams unbloodied?

Even before the evils, back when her smiles were still Glenda-the-good-witch charming, Medea caught the mind’s eye. More than Jason ever could, that milquetoast memorable for theft and desertion, and capturing the love of a woman so far beyond him that only rankest misogyny stifling to stillborn our daughters’ horizons explains it.

I would be Medea, if I could. Even in the before, yes. And in the after, a thousand thousand yeses. I would stand bathed in blood and vengeance; I would know the dangers of disobeying and fling myself regardless from an Olympic peak.

Wait. No.

Not regardless.

Regard-full.

Continue reading →

First Apple

by AliceApril 1, 2019April 2, 2019

The story that started it all is not a woman’s disobedience, but a woman’s hunger. Generations of daughters cursed because of what one woman put in her mouth, chewed, swallowed.

“Do you really want to eat that?” my mother asks.

Love does not put down a plate only to insist that you abstain.

Love does not hold out scent, flavor, the crisp bite you can already feel sweetening against your tongue, and tell you: “Don’t eat.”

Continue reading “First Apple” →

Inanna Ascending

by AliceOctober 24, 2018August 29, 2019

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”

~ Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

◊

“From the great heaven the goddess set her mind on the great below.
Inanna set her mind on the great below and abandoned heaven, abandoned earth…
Who has ever ascended from the underworld,
who has ascended unscathed from the underworld?”

~ from the Sumerian epic Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld

I. Invocation

Queen of heaven’s ziggurat!
Bringer of war and bestower of lust,
Mother of humanity!

If you cannot divine which holy face I turn
towards you from the sky,
remember only this:

You fail to worship me at your peril.

II. Rape Under the Palm Tree

Ask what was I wearing that day
and I will tell you: rags / robes /
nothing at all.

Ask and I will tell you: my sovereignty
flying across the sky like a rainbow.

Ask and I will turn
your blood
to water.

Continue reading “Inanna Ascending” →

Now turns the fallow earth in grief and also light.

by AliceNovember 13, 2017November 14, 2017

I am in the shower tonight.

For over an hour.

Again.

Seems I cannot shower enough during these dark, chilling days of autumn. For reasons I still find curious.

What reasons, you ask.

I could tell you. I could say that I like the heat and how the wet steam rises, or that I am washing off the stench of each day’s ever more rancid news, or that I have a new-found dedication to feminine conventions and shave my legs now twice daily, maybe my pubes too. In fact, I like these answers. I think I will tell you one of them. Or you just pick yourself a favorite, and pretend it’s what I said.

Pretend I did not tell you the truth: that I am still learning what it means to feel, in all the senses of the word and of the senses, and it is only when hot water hits me everywhere and all at once that I can remember the names of human emotion.

Most of the time I spend standing in the shower I am crying. Don’t read too much into that, though.

Showers are a liminal space, is all.

Continue reading “Now turns the fallow earth in grief and also light.” →

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a feminist writes, rants, remembers

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