MUZZLE MAGAZINE
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog

For My Sister in Inpatient Care
by Dorsey Craft

My sister makes a spiderweb of her arm, 
the cuts silk wild around her wrist 

while I read The Odyssey, where Athena makes curls 
sprout hyacinth-wet from bedraggled Odysseus 

to win white-armed Nausica’s heart. His lies 
tendril while a man smears my sister 

like a mosquito, wipes her away like dirty rain, 
and now she plucks threads from her jeans 

in the hospital, her fingers jittery as lizards, 
just as they were on picture day when she sawed 

the sleeves off my red top, her every freckle grinning 
with light in the portrait, god-like as Odysseus 

swears Nausica looks, playing ball with tittering 
servant girls, washing her linens and her father’s, too, 

because Athena whispers to her, promising marriage 
and my sister wore a braided crown, jeweled sandals 

that sparked, in a ceremony of woven tissue, of sugar 
and sun, of stitches sure as spring, and if I were Athena, 

I’d take the shape of her man, but taller, broader, 
big enough to lift her, to kiss her ear, to murmur 

You are smooth as shell, or perhaps I’d shift to the black 
dog whose fur she wets on evenings she’s left alone, 

I wouldn’t say a thing, I’d press my head to her chest, 
then sink the first man who came to the door.

Dorsey Craft is the author of PLUNDER (Bauhan 2020), winner of the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Jacksonville, Florida.

ISSN 2157-8079
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog