Featured Poems From Mythic Delirium, Issue 14, Winter/Spring 2006 The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest Catherynne M. Valente

this is here to make the spacing work

Hades is a place I know in Ohio, at the bottom of a long, black stair                 winding down I-76 from Pennsylvania,                 winding down the weeds through the September damp and that old tangled root system of asphalt and asphodel,                 to the ash-fields, clotted with fallen acorns like rain puddled in fibrous pools.                 Dead hands dice onions there on an old oak cutting board, dead hands spackled by iron rings, by jewels, red and dark,                 set into the skin like liver-spots,                 and all these white curls are piled before me, old fingernails cairn-stacked.                 It is quiet in the Underworld, and every night stews and cakes and wine appear on cedar tables,                 served by slender hands that promise no harm, no harm                 could ever come from eating these rich and                                  shining things. Someone has tracked crocus petals all through the house, a ruin of purple —                 and I cannot recall if I am allowed,                 in this place,                 to walk on it. Don’t you know these are your fruits? Don’t you know these are your flowers? The pomegranates are not ripe yet, but Ascalaphus talks shop with me at the Farmer’s Market,                 shows me Empress plums,                 papaya and mint sprigs,                 a nice Japanese pear tree of his own breed,                 heavy with colorless fruit. The grafting process is difficult, like wedding flesh to flesh,                 and there is so much blood. Eat. Eat. Don’t you know these are your fruits? Don’t you know these are your flowers? If they notice the wheat clinging to my heels, if they are embarrassed by shreds of California hanging from my skin like prayer flags, they say nothing. The dead can wait —                 by March I will glitter like them,                 my flesh a nest of stones. Now they stir at silver pots in silence, ladling broth over dumplings, lips moving over incantations I cannot hear, fingers brushing my hair as if,                 when last I was here, they had forgotten to tell me some secret thing. Eat. Eat.                 They tell me the river burned here once — the dead do not see where they are, they think that snarl of water is the Cuyahoga, they think that heave of grey is Erie,                 but I see, I see it,                 the Phlegethon boiling into gasoline, braceleting the Acherusian Lake, where limbs like gasping reach up out of the wet, clutching quarters, Kennedy half-dollars, pennies splashing from their blue-palmed grip.                 I see it, the smoke unfolding like a manuscript, and fire like faces in the deep. Don’t you know these are your fruits? Don’t you know these are your flowers?

this is here to make the spacing work

From Issue 14, Winter/Spring 2006 Trapped Words Anna Tambour

this is here to make the spacing work

Some words need more than pity stuck in their amber meaning till language metamorphs or as carbon, decomposes. Colostomy. I’m melting the matrix gently, this biggish lump, over a tender heat. It shrinks, and glimmers . . . and just before it poofs, I pluck it from the pan — etheria, now fine as dust in Nihil. Drip goldenly for a moment — and now for our flight outdoors. Stars splay so wide, surer than spinnakers. Me pinned so small, a specimen with dew-soaked feet, I load the burrowdingdangian created for this job. The colostomy, now cooled, has spread to awkward form again — Sloppy as deconstructivism, it needs due folding, and tamping, and ramming           down the bore. But after a bit of jaggery, it’s done — tight as a bloodclot. Now! the aether whispers: Now press the malabar. Let that burrowdingdangian blow! Browse * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * My blood and guts and bones and my surprise are shoved earth shorewards by the backdraft burrawang. Dazzled floridians fling liver and lights, enclosed by ‘me’,           to gravity’s wet arms. And when my eyes can peer again on spinetting stars not of my own head’s making, There! The colostomy floats utter as the most sure oldness in the fathomless inverted pool astronomers plumb like little boys with fruitcakes filled with stars as           thumb-caught prizes. Colostomy — magnificent constellation. I’d swear it spinks, magnifies at me as it settles in its sum, if you wouldn’t cough me brambled           to the outermost sunrises.

this is here to make the spacing work

“The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest” and accompanying illustration first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 14, Winter/Spring 2006. “The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest” copyright © 2006 by Catherynne M. Valente. Illustration copyright © 2006 by Paula Friedlander. Voice recording by Catherynne M. Valente, © 2006; all rights reserved. “Trapped Words” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 14, Winter/Spring 2006. “Trapped Words” copyright © 2006 by Anna Tambour. Illustration by Mike and Anita Allen, copyright © 2006. Voice recording by Alistair Rennie, © 2006; all rights reserved. These poems and illustrations may not be reproduced in any form without the authors’ and artists’ express written permission. Back to newest featured poems.