☀ Today's Poem: "Mythology" Mira Rosenthal

After all these years & halfway
around the world on this deck
where I'm sitting at home

in the sun & can see that some
newly hatched insect has chewed
& chewed the lips of the just

sprung Irises I've been growing,
the axis tilts & sways the ground
or whatever it is I am

standing on now below
my feet, not a ship
to go through like a business

of ferrets, but a bus
that I'm riding again
through a city on the other side

of the planet, crowded, so
crowded in fact
that I'm holding on

to the strap & rocking
in the absent-minded way
one does when commuting

to work in stockings & dress
with all the rest that we know
but don't change about pay,

since it's abstract & given
in exchange, compensation
for what it is you did

today & today by the piece
or, in my case, as temp
by the hour, in some

unknowable nowhere
devoid of the body, only it was
my body brought me back

to the bus, my breast
to be exact that some man
was cupping, reaching around

from behind & it took me
a minute to feel the pressure
like stiff copper

armor strapped on
for a battle & then
to feel the silence

of all the other passengers
hushed & waiting, a sound
like a hundred little bites ticking

within each second & still
the fact goes by
too fast, the man's hand

on my breast & you
reading these lines
to the moment when

I never even slap the man,
just turn & glare & pry
his fingers from my flesh

as if gently loosening
a bulb with a cultivator
all these years later & half-way

around the globe, where I
am a goddess with a stick
sometimes, I do a lot of smiting

in the garden where I thwack
& smash the beautiful backs
of the grasshoppers then bury them

alive with the point
of the stick into a quick hole
of a grave, below topsoil, since

their teeth remind me
of the knives kings used to wield
when getting to the business

of cutting out the tongues
of all the women they desired
after—