HEAD OF MEDUSA
as the reedy sonata of squelch and blade-spun air cinched its coda like a drawstring sack around us I did not dodge behind
the broken pediments monolithing men who always meant to unbuckle burdens here then look away into some certain
softer land than this how precisely as a sting had thingness warped me into horror the very wrong span of my lifetime
the rigor sitting below my collarbones my being not the “great work” but the body at the end of which it could find itself great
strange to them a gaze fatal and not theirs stranger still to be beheld and collectible and them what they think I used to be
was if in possession of eyes as well as agency preposterous
I didn’t move I knew because he must he would tell them
I had murder-thirst hid needles on my spine my hips a thrift
of diamonds he could have it that way but here was the stillest
minute slipped between me and the myth of myself mirrored
in the shield the secant angles of his skull the wide eye within it
the iris’s loose grip on the pit that held my face which was stunning coal-hard in all that it had borne a monstrous feat
of weathering this world that it would not be changed by me had been for the longest the tyranny of its terrain but look
at my garden and the black field blown alive around me the hair-raised woodlands the hills at their backs rough shore
beyond that somehow in earshot the stone churn overturned the green sea cradled in the valley I became a fault in him
no stitch of briefer things ever had been so undone
THE FRATRICIDE
JUSTIN PHILLIP REED is the author of A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books, 2016). His first full-length collection of poetry, Indecency, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2018. His work is forthcoming in African American Review, Black Warrior Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He lives in Saint Louis and coordinates public programming for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.