The Golden Fleece! The Golden Fleece!
      he shrieked.

'Get over it.
Get some sheep,' I told him,
dismantling my tongue
            and laying the pieces out on the Aegean marble table. Already,
we had wasted
10 years. Already, thousands had died
at my hands.

Daily, Dread & Co.
kept moving all our candy-cane striped furniture
off the ship.
Dead squirrels kept calling out to me from beneath the frozen tundra, advertising
                                    fake diamond jewelry.

That he had a silver-plated fork for
a tongue
was our gravest misfortune. I wrote to Stalin, 'Over the dead sea, the winter sky
            is shredded into holes
that I kept falling through.'

In Mongolia, snow-blind, I became lost
in a maze of white.
(The walls of the maze were chock full of miraculous creatures.
                                    Naked, male. Miraculous.)

In Sparta, I ate a piece of black licorice,
and it turned into a larva. At an oracle in Ethiopia, a golden mask
            of the sun
told me to take up knitting.

I killed our children.
It kindled his desire.

I said, Back, hornet! I am off
            with the scantily clad snow-angels!

Starting to cry, I said,
            One by one,
            they will lick each of
my blinding transgressions clean.

____

One particular playbill for Euripides’ Medea reads: "Come see the witch! The murderer of her own children! Spurned for a younger woman, she uses black sorcery to kill her!

Maligned
Enchantress
Domesticizes
Every
Atrocity!"

As has my dear friend of late. This poem speaks through/for her.