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.
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.