The Last Harpy

A man told me he wanted
to fuck me, make me feel
like a god or a sun. To fuck
until we split in two, until
Aristophanes got heartburn
watching us hop all about
with just one leg, one arm,
one eye, half a nose. He said
you have the face of a Greek god.
I told him, be careful. Zeus
might turn me into a grackle,
then a constellation, then a story.
I’ll kill the bastard. Then he’d be
a bear or a weasel or a turtle
and then we’d both just be stars.
Just be stories. He seems to like
the chance to be a star. I like
popping balloons with cake knives,
autoharps, clams and hula hoops.
I want a Shelley Duval biopic,
ice cubes dunked in cream cheese,
to teach the soot-covered canaries
to read The State and Revolution,
ways to unionize. A man told me
you have the face of a Greek god.
He’s never seen a Greek god.

*

Jillian A. Fantin is an MFA candidate at the University of Notre Dame. They are the recipient of a 2021 Poet Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and they regularly collaborate with Chicago-based mixed media artist Kate Luther. Jillian’s poetry is published in or forthcoming from The American Journal of Poetry, TIMBER, The Daily Drunk, Entropy, wind up mice, Selcouth Station, Homology Lit, and elsewhere.