Two Poems by Larissa Shmailo
Scylla and Charybdis
Unsheathe your dagger definitions.
Streams of tendency
and the eons they worship.
God’s noise in the street: Space.
What is a ghost? Dialectic:
No man, not a woman,
will ever know.
Oxen of the Sun
Send us, bright one, light one, wombfruit.
Before born babe bliss had;
within womb won he worship.
Too, she will bring forth by God
His bounty and have joy of
her childing.
(A pregnancy without joy,
a birth without pangs, a
body without blemish, a
belly without bigness.)
There, that got in, through pleading,
her belly. And now on the stools,
poor body, two days past her time,
the midwives sore and can’t deliver.
The abnormalities of harelip, breast
mole, supernumerary digit, straw-
berry mark and portwine stain.
Swineheaded, doghaired infants
occasionally born.
Little father, little father:
The Minotaur.
*Note: Both poems are erasures from Ulysses
