Annie Przypyszny
Maze and Muse
My Muse has no laurels
or lyre. She doesn’t live
by the Hippocrene, she lives in a hole in the ground
that is not a grave,
but can’t she see the resemblance? When she sleeps,
the pill bugs crawl
out of the soil and outline her body;
when she sleeps,
she is troubled by dreams that are too bright
and too wide,
and she makes me transcribe them every morning.
For example, last night
she dreamt she killed me with a blade of sunlight.
I told her I know,
it was my dream, too. I’ve tried to rid myself of her:
I’ve sent her to convents,
but they send her right back, citing sacrilege, blasphemy,
and bad table manners.
I’ve had her committed, but she kept being discharged—
she can recite the oaths of sanity
so well. Once, I took her to a corn maze,
dared her to come out
the other side. As she weaved her way through,
I blocked her in,
entrance and exit, with huge slabs of stone, rendering her
a captive of the fall.
I thought she’d perish there, but by the end of the season,
I found her knocking
at my window, her face pale as a lily, eyes loony
as moons.
She kept mumbling to herself
about how beautiful the corn was,
how it was sleek and gold as Hera’s hair. What a joke—going on
about Hera’s hair.
Strange Cat
Strange Cat follows
me. I only stroked
her once. Can’t shake
her now, weird
thing. Fur tarantula-
rough. Mew like the cry
of a heretic proudly
burning. Shadows
cartwheel in her big
bronze eyes. She’s
bizarre. I don’t
like her. She tries
to eat everything:
nickels, lightbulbs.
She bit into my
pen and lapped
the black ink like
milk. Bad
manners. Bad
hygiene. Bad
ballpoint breath.
I said shoo.
I said get
lost. I shoved
a crucifix
in her grin
but she just scraped
Christ’s face
with her rude
pink tongue.
She thinks she’s
my familiar but
she’s not. Just look
at her. Now look
at me. No, look
at me. I said
at me.
