Featured Poems A Mythic Delirium Classic From Mythic Delirium, Issue 7, Summer/Fall 2002 Medusa’s Tale David C. Kopaska-Merkel This text will be replaced

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She lived alone, they say, on an island with a small olive grove and her collection of statuary for company. She died alone, save for her killer, and was ill-used after her death. That’s one version, anyway; here is another part of her story. She walked at dawn upon the beach. A storm had passed during the night, the olives had lost some limbs but they would live. On the sand much flotsam lay: timbers from a ship, amphorae, a tattered man, a bandage round his head. She knelt beside him, fingers probed his wounds, discovered he still lived. She bore him home, cleaned his injured parts, wrapped linen round his damaged head, awakened him with wine. “My eyes,” he says, hesitantly touching the bandage that binds his head, “are covered; were they wounded? Who is it who succors me?” She says swiftly “touch not the bandage — your eyes must remain in darkness.” He is weak, lets her feed him, give him more wine, wash his limbs, and more. He talks, tells her of his travels. She listens, only catches his hand if it should stray too near the bandage on his head, or too near her own. Even when she beds him, she forbids him to touch her head. There comes a day when he asks about the noise that he’s been hearing, louder whene’er she is near, fainter when she departs, absent when she is absent, a faint sussurus, perhaps the wind in sere, dead leaves. That’s when she tells him of her curse, that he may never see her. He laughs. “Oh joyous day!” he cries, “that my infirmity should bring me joy at last. My sight was taken from me years ago, My eyes might be two stones!” (She winces, then.) He tears off the bandage, gazes steadily toward where he hears her breath, then reaches for her cheek. She does not stay his hand, which reads the contours of her face, her ophidian hair, he smiles, draws her lips to his. Later, she allows the tears to fall. The tale does not say they lived happily ever after; her sightless consort was mortal after all, and must have lived only a few decades at most. She died alone (save for her killer), they say, not far from her dead lover’s grave, most likely, and mayhap she thought it time.

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From Mythic Delirium, Issue 18, Winter/Spring 2008 (You Are Here) You Are Often Replaced Gene van Troyer This text will be replaced

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Everyone’s trawling meaning in the flotsam cast up by this ocean of text and video. You go to your page and discover it’s gone. The zing in your nerves feels like burnout around the next curve in a light speed rail gun race, your neurotransmitters boil in your synaptic gaps. Web pages plaster you like flakes of powdered quantum snow — you’re grown up enough to have got this far, so you can mark your own place in the unbound book of everything and hope it stays hung together by that most tenuous thread of links: You Are Here: your page is gone. Thanks for your prompt answer to my questions, you think at an entity that you’re sure is lurking between the particle spin states. Who stole my domain? You Are Here: dive into that throbbing mark so red in the negative sky. It’s one of many like precious gems on a beaded super string whipped in all directions in a froth of electroencephalographic scribbles. It’s the only map you’ve got. You are viewing a simplified version of You suggested by the metadata, the lurking entity sings from between the spin states of your intranet brain cells. Note however, that apart from the layout, its content is unaltered. It was always an apostrophe anyway. Stick two of them side-by-side and they might quote nothing, be taken for 69, or look like Yin and Yang. In any case, you’re stuck between them like a thought that’s waiting to be born. It isn’t that your page is gone, so much as the address that’s changed. Your link is moored to the apostrophe, your possessive, your marker of contraction. Each time your page reloads it’s something new. What happens to the old ones as they fall away? They sink between the deep ravines that loop like coral patterns through your brain. Each settles into memory like a grain of sand eroded from a crystal hologram. You are replaced by a refreshed you with every reload of your page. You wonder if you’re just an avatar suggested by your name. As the light behind your eyes casts out across the heaving surface of the pixilated sea that rolls in fractal waves across your screen, does it matter? You’re still the same by any name. It’s there between your spin states. You are here.

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“Medusa’s Tale” and accompanying illustrations first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 7, Summer/Fall 2002. “Medusa’s Tale” copyright © 2002 by David C. Kopaska-Merkel. Illustrations by Daniel Trout, copyright © 2002. Voice recording by Amal El-Mohtar, © 2008; all rights reserved. “(You Are Here) You Are Often Replaced” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 18, Winter/Spring 2008. “(You Are Here) You Are Often Replaced” copyright © 2008 by Gene van Troyer. Collage illustration by Mike Allen. Voice recording by Gene van Troyer, © 2008; all rights reserved. These poems and illustrations may not be reproduced in any form without the authors’ and artists’ express written permission. Previous classic and featured poems by: Jeannine Hall Gailey and Charlee Jacob Theodora Goss and Sonya Taaffe Samantha Henderson and Ann K. Schwader Catherynne M. Valente and Anna Tambour Back to newest featured poems.