Featured Poems A Mythic Delirium Classic From Mythic Delirium, Issue 8, Winter/Spring 2003 Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks Theodora Goss Video by Anita Allen, recorded at ReaderCon 18, July 2007.

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The Mask of Inquiry asks: Why are you here, Octavia? The linens have been spread for the wedding feast. The glasses have been filled with yellow wine. A roasted pig lies in its bed of parsley, squabs lift their legs in paper caps between turnips carved to resemble roses. The wedding guests are waiting to toast the bride.         The Mask of Elegance says: The Duke sits beside an empty chair. There is a collar of Flanders lace beneath his receding chin, there is a boot of Spanish leather on his club foot. A ring of gold and onyx has slipped from his finger. His chin has dropped and his lips are slightly parted, as though to ask a question. Surely he is asking where you are, Octavia.         The Mask of Confusion says: A fly wanders over the breast of a Countess, and she does not brush it away. The page boys lie with their legs tangled, like lovers.         The Mask of Propriety says: There is blood on the hem of your petticoat, which ought to be as white as snow, as bone, as virginity. There is blood on the hem of your dress, and blood on the seed pearls sown in an arabesque across your train. There is blood beneath the fingernails of your right hand.         The Mask of Flattery says: You are beautiful tonight, Octavia. Your hair, piled on your head in ringlets, shines like a nest of little black snakes. Your eyes are the color of rusted coins, your neck the color of old ivory.         The Mask of Skepticism says: Yes, you are beautiful, like something dead.         The Mask of Nostalgia says: Ivy grows over the walls of your father’s castle, leaves rustling where sparrows have made their nests. Bubbles appear on the surface of the moat, and you wonder what lies beneath the lily flowers. You dip your toes into the green water. A trout rises to the surface, flashing its dark iridescence, and then sinks again. In the distance, cowbells chime, low and irregular.         The moon rises.         Your shifts are laid in chests scented with lavender. Your bed is spread with sheets of ironed linen edged with lace. They are marked with a red spot from the first time blood ran between your legs.         The moon is touching the tops of the chestnut trees. You enter the grotto where you first lay down for the gamekeeper’s boy.         The Mask of Seduction says: The thief is waiting for you in the forest. His lips are thick and the backs of his hands are covered with black hair. His grip will bruise your wrist, his filth will rub off on your body.         The Mask of Longing says: He will tickle the insides of your thighs with a knife.         The Mask of Perception says: The thief with eyes like the backs of mirrors was once the gamekeeper’s boy.         The Mask of Accusation says: You have poisoned the wine, Octavia. You have poured a white powder into the glasses. The wedding guests have drunk in careful sips. How silently they sit, how very still.         You have stabbed the Duke, and licked the knife you stabbed him with. You have spit blood and saliva on his cheek. It runs down and stains his collar with a spot of red.         The Mask of Consequences says: The knife is still in your hand, Octavia. Put it to your wrist, peel back the skin as you would peel a damson plum.         The Mask of Fragmentation says: Your wrists are streaming away in red ribbons. Your dress falls like confetti. Your corset disintegrates, and moths of white silk flutter through the corridors. Your waist cracks, your torso crashes on the floor. Your hair writhes like little black snakes, then crawls into hidden corners. Your nose breaks, like the nose of an Attic statue. A breeze blows away your left ear.         Only your mouth remains. It parts and attempts to speak without teeth or palate or tongue, saying nothing, not even stirring the air.

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A Mythic Delirium Classic From Issue 5, Summer/Fall 2001 Turn of the Century, Jack-in-the-Green Sonya Taaffe Video by Anita Allen, recorded at ReaderCon 18, July 2007.

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Hard to love a Green Man in these times: not the October dying, not the gathered harvest, sinking sun and yellowing grass, sere season before the snow; those are little deaths, and common. The everyday kills him. His ivy hair crisps and turns brittle to the touch of my hand, brown spiky garland about his ears. Outdoors he wears a hat and moans that the sun does not stir his flesh. His skin has the pungency of leaf-mold and broken-twig sap, grapes in the crushing and the underside of a loamy crumble of bark; the clerk at the video store wrinkles his nose and indicates the CVS across the street. I fear for him: that he grows torpid, wintry and comatose, a hothouse seedling teased into midwinter flower. He flinches when he sees potted windowsill plants, glossy, docile, gentled. His brown hands catch on my skin. His eyes are green, wood-drowned, chlorophyll-soaked, stung by fluorescent light. Sneakers chafe his feet, pavement rebuffs the pliant taproots of his toes. He is dying. His kisses are the inner coils of a fiddlehead and begin to taste like the dry snap of a bloodless fallen branch. The jagged holly spread of his fingers grows stiff, spiny, and the texture of his skin withers into fallen leaves. He will always die. But I worry: in the spring, when rain runs down the thousand glass panels of the buildings downtown and the streets fill with sand and salt slush, when the stunted trees on the corners break into pallid bud and perhaps the sky is rinsed clear for the equinox, when the balance of the seasons tilts toward the sun again, my green man, my Jack, whose browning eyes seek out the sun, whose bones curl verdant into vine and springing leaf, will he remember in his earthy grave beneath the asphalt, will he rise up from the concrete soil, in this electric world, will he return?

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“Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 8, Winter/Spring 2003. “Octavia is Lost in the Hall of Masks” copyright © 2003 by Theodora Goss. Video recording by Anita Allen, © 2007; all rights reserved. “Turn of the Century, Jack-in-the-Green” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 5, Summer/Fall 2001. “Turn of the Century, Jack-in-the-Green” copyright © 2001 by Sonya Taaffe. Video recording by Anita Allen, © 2007; all rights reserved. Illustrations by Daniel Trout, copyright © 2001, 2003, 2007. These poems and illustrations may not be reproduced in any form without the authors’ or artist’s express written permission. Previous classic and featured poems by: Samantha Henderson and Ann K. Schwader Catherynne M. Valente and Anna Tambour Back to newest featured poems.