Self Portrait as Circe
By Marceline White
Men wash upon my shore like drowned rats. I rescue them,
open my home, prepare a feast of olives, cheese, and fowl.
It is me that they intend to devour. They want womanly flesh.
So I use my knowledge, the plants I’ve tended to transform.
They guzzle another goblet of wine which soon sloshes
from their porcine mouths. I place them in pens.
It is minor magic really, a mirror trick-showing men
their inner selves. Beasts mostly. Not all, of course. Some,
I’ve even loved. One was flighty and feckless, like loving a bird.
Another I loved well and fully, if only for a few moons turnings.
He gave himself to me, my body an island for his nightly wanderings.
I stood tall, sang with my sweetest voice. For a time, he did not try to dim me.
He left me with the great gift of our son. Now, lovers come and go
like the tides. Perhaps there will come another that will
make me want to anoint my skin with herbaceous oils,
weave flowers through my hair, together sing the bodies’ melodies.
I am sometimes lonely, but mostly content eating goat cheese and figs, drinking
gold honeyed wine, floating in the azure sea.
Perhaps, I will continue transforming myself into a creature that I can mostly love;
I make feasts for one, weave a web from the finest thread, sing myself to sleep.
Marceline White is a Baltimore-based writer and activist. A two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her writing has appeared in trampset, Prime Number Magazine, Feral, Harpy Hybrid, The Orchard Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, and others. Residencies include Aspen Words and Event Horizon. Read more at www.marcelinewhitewrites.com