READ A POEM
ARIADNE'S KNIFE
by Bonné de Blas
The map in my hand bulges. Folds creased widdershins harbor the charcoal of verdigris, spill shavings of rituals laid bare by lightning. Great stones without witness. No memory of our cities. Surrounded by somnambulant houses, the founders of asylums blow upon their keys. Beckon to beneath the iron gate strewn with fables.
In the canopied marketplace, the dead seize the quick by their tongues and sandal straps. A boisterous place of sepulcher. The tiny girls in orange and gold gather up torn feathers, the husks of figs, drained rumors.
Near the archway, a severed spider web. The calligraphy of ochred breezes.
At the threshold of the desert falls the gnomon of my own latitude, eclipsing my shadow; a short, thin fossil blossoming within its own resistance. A promise amputated. In clamoring purple waters, bites of sunlight dapple my fingers, my open throat.
"Ariadne's Knife," by Bonné de Blas, from What I Knew Before I Knew: Poems from Pudding House Salon--Cleveland, Sammy Greenspan, ed. Pudding House Publications, 2010. Used by permission of the author.
Bonné de Blas is an MFA candidate in poetry at Kent State University’s consortium Northeast Ohio MFA program where she teaches writing composition and creative writing. She received an MA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and a JD from Case Western Reserve University School of Law. She is the author of two chapbooks,
The Act of Dwelling (NightBallet Press) and
The Rule of Contraction (Kattywompus Press), and her
essay in
Older Queer Voices: The Intimacy of Survival, Lambert and Einstein, eds., received a “Best of the Net 2017” nomination.
WRITE A POEM
Write a poem about yourself from the point of view of your worst enemy.