“Maggots: A Rapture” and “Legacy of Strega” are two gloriously grisly poems by Christina M. Rau in our Summer 2016 issue.
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“Maggots: A Rapture”
AND AFTER THE THREE GODS CREATED
humans from two paired trees;
after they broke down the body of Ymir:
his skull the sky, his brains the clouds,
bones unbroken into mountains,
his blood all oceans, flesh flensed clean
into all the mortal world,
the maggots came
feasting on unused parts:
the brow, the spleen, the lining of arteries.
Such is the nature of maggots,
to clean up the messes of giants.
The gods wished to continue creating
to fill up the chaotic void unperturbed.
And so, the gods cast their random plan—
Immoral maggots banished
as a race of chthonic trolls—
may a hint of daylight render them to stone.
The maggots deemed moral found
a place to flit about somewhere between
Earth and Heaven, lovely fairies of light.
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“Legacy of Strega”
HIS FATHER DIED IN CORSICA. Natural causes. When a man gets stabbed, naturally he bleeds. When a man gets stabbed more than once, naturally he bleeds more. When all the blood bleeds out, naturally he dies.
His mother died in Corsica. On a full stomach. She sucked up all the husband’s blood, her lips on each stab wound. Then she found some daggers and plunged them into herself.
Into the tomb they went, his dead mother and him in her womb. Self-sufficient in a dead space in a dead space. Self-delivered from a dead space into a dead space. Then he climbed out. It was night.
From dark place in a dark place to wide open dark place. To dabble with goblins. To make a new race. To suck. To scour. To ghoul and gyre. To hunt nocturnal. On moors. Crags of rock. Pale to the moonlight.
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CHRISTINA M. RAU is the author of the poetry chapbooks WakeBreatheMove (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and For The Girls, I (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Founder of Poets In Nassau, a reading circuit on Long Island, NY, her poetry has appeared on gallery walls in The Ekphrastic Poster Show, on car magnets for The Living Poetry Project, and most recently in the journals Queen Mob’s Teahouse and Meniscus. In her non-writing life, she practices yoga occasionally and line dances on other occasions. She blogs at http://alifeofwe.blogspot.com and does everything else at www.christinamrau.com.
FLAPPERHOUSE 