Sagittarius – Sofija Popovska

April 14, 2023

Meeting cobblestone with experienced clicks,

Osculating the furrowed brow of a small street, 

(Jostled on either side by stygian taverns and wood beam wrecks

Where generations involute to reveal recessive manes,

Macerated in gold, receding in history and volume)

Her boots, embossed with their own lacing,

Worn smooth and taciturn with memories of past cobblestone,

Carried on their shuffle and skip, performing their happy defect,

The legacy of carrion, of bodies animated against nature’s best interest, 

Satyr-ical, Saturnian, devourers of that which they occupy.

They make Neptunian lovers, a bitter wine, 

Or an absinthe —

Not for the homonymous condition they are found (or lost) in, inevitably,

But for the toxic green — the color of a pond’s afterlife,

Its rotting mythos, touched with the silver of fish bellies turned to the sun

As with the twinkle of a smile.

The archer is a ranconteur, a poor man’s Jesuit,

A snake-oil Chiron, a gothic clown,

A colporteur of personal journals,

An avid read thereof, casting about in the sky

With a righteous pleading treble,

Enraptured with her alexandrian faith in a divine imprimatur. And what of Jupiter?

He bears a strong resemblance to her skull —

A mass of air and the occasional electric storm —

A signal flare fired by her single neuron, lost in the dust of afterthoughts,

A tangle of antiques and antics.

A gourmand that feeds on scraps! But so it goes:

The maimed father gives her nothing,

And her mother — a hephaestian limp, casting her out

For her aversion to teutonic rigor,

For the crooked smile,

For promiscuity — that love of glitter, cheaply-made desiderata, their vatic peace with being cast aside,

With being catalogued, but not remembered,

Felt up and down, but never seen.

She plays cruel pranks, but chiefly on her person,

That merry murder of a self hard-boiled, wrought carefully, refined

With whips and arrows and the words of centuries,

Only to walk into the wind stripped bare, exposed and pink,

And laughing at new wounds, her bloodied feet,

Red kiss-stains for the road, for history.