Clytemnestra, after
by a.d.
Clytemnestra, after
Every morning she treads the perimeter of her fostered graveyard, abloom with rows of white jessamine that abandons itself to the night. Grief has ravaged her, but you could not tell from looking at her— she bears it well, as only mothers know to bear and absorb their suffering. She exerts her dignity, in the way she holds her head, her fierce, unwavering eyes, the way she bends gracefully to halo the fallen petals around her daughter’s name, a blaze of gold jewelry that descends like a blade in the first rays of sun.
The curtains she keeps drawn to prevent time from trespassing. Diurnally she repristinates her daughter’s bed, even though no slumbering body has disturbed it in years. The strained mind can easily be deceived by substituting movement for loss, by filling out an absence with gestures, with a displacement of air. The girl no longer visits; the tenuous veins that bound her to this world have been severed now that her killer’s hands have turned to ash.
They talk about her down in the village, the chorus of lonely women, tenders of whispers. You can mark out her presence by the hush that precedes her, the voices that follow in her wake. They say she’s taken a lover from out of town, that he haunts the halls of the house like a possession. That at night he mounts the bedroom terrace for a smoke, wearing the old master’s robe, the fume from his cigar deforming his face into another’s.
They say she killed her husband after he traded their daughter's life for favor in the war. After he died, she wore black for the longest time.
a.d. is drawn to the sacred, the profane, the mysterious and the mythological, which provides inspiration for her work. She is an award-nominated bisexual poet, writer, and visual artist, and her work has appeared in HAD, Aôthen, ECHO Review, Cosmic Daffodil, Hominum Journal, Prosetrics, and elsewhere. Tumblr & Twitter: wayne
Dig a classical theme.