Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2018  Vol. 17 No. 1
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back JEANNE LARSEN

Trans-Trans-Human Teiresias Urges—Having

drunk black ram’s blood—the twisty ever-in-transit
sword-swinger to heft his oar athwart
a shoulder muscle, strike out [far from goatish
Ithaka, far even from the wavy sea-lord’s
realm] till ocean-threshing implement trans
-itions [syllabic breaks queer too, in Hades]
to a shovel-paddle for sifting hick agri-cult
-uralists’ husky grain. There, of wheat or dust,

a tumulus must rise. Will be oar/winnower
topped. There, earth-shaker gets owings & blinding reaver

rests at last, big stick turned sign of heroes
squandered, towns sacked, a certain gender’s persons
torn from near to sweaty-actual enslavement.
Of suitors spitted & walls, blood-streaky, breached.


All for the cipher man-whore-made of a gold
haired woman’s face. All for, for real, an oily
trade-war. Might this mound be glory, a jot
of OMG great O, re-coded? Say, yes.
We need us some deities in these parts. Need
to make old wrongs [not his fault] right. Now say,
if mythic protag heaps his own grave, moving
per augury’s instruction with his epic

flail, zat what makes almost-undead whole vagrant
crew of unruly sēmata, in every go-round

buried? It [you dig?]as well as him
-self entombed. If so, so we make trans
-mortal that dead-on corkscrew boychik. Make him,
each flipping time we eyeball it, draggy divine.  


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