RIVKA CLIFTON: THE MINOTAUR

THE MINOTAUR

The wind carried itself

through the city.

It lifted and dropped my neighbor’s

string lights—their egg-like

bulbs breaking against wood

posts. The wind

like fingers through the hair

of the city’s dead body.

Where one thinks there

is movement—in the dark

the pale creatures multiplying within

it, until the organ’s

labyrinthine turns within the skin bulge

and burst. I keep coming

back to architecture.

My body’s ever-shifting

structure, John in the other

room, puzzling over the maze

his hands make of our apartment’s box.

A right angle shows a body

what it is not.

At night, floating above John

ramming himself into me, I know

the claw hammer’s collision with drywall

is a parabola, its arc like a mouth full of teeth.

There is no such thing as perpendicular—

the hoof against stone,

the needle resting on skin,

the hand held against

the lips. I’m watching John

watch himself

move within me. There is no amazement

in my recesses, only multiplications.

He recoils in the dark,

brings an ember to his

face and inhales. I think

of snakes—how

I believe they shimmer, even

in the dark, but they don’t.

Within a windowless chamber

there could be a snake, and I

wouldn’t know.

There could be a panting

body, and I wouldn’t know.

I’m supposed to eat without

discernment—like a snake

unhinging its jaw. The abandoned

doors, with their empty

hinges, propped

against fences, in each flashbang

of burst bulbs, their features

shift. I watch until I can’t watch

anymore. I learn

in the dark how to be afraid.

BIO:

Rivka Clifton is the transfemme author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) as well as the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines.