Her sons laughing, smearing honey on each other’s faces as they devour. Calling for her to join, so she rises and sits beside them, chews a piece of bread, her jaws flat and slack, far away, some beast in the field and nothing more, dumb creature without thought, but they tug at her and make her try figs and even dates, large and too sweet, brought from somewhere over the sea. They paint her face, too, with the honey, and she should laugh and smile but she feels dead.

What should a mother want? Her sons happy, her husband in favor with the king. After so many years of labor in stone and fire, a release. All given to them, easy lives. She should learn to bow down, forget Jason’s vows, forget all she sacrificed, and be grateful. Let him return when he wants, go away when he pleases, ask no questions, apologize to Kreon for her rough words. Isn’t this what a mother should do?

How, then, can she make herself do this? Hekate, she calls. Or softer Nute. Tell me how.

9

9

Medea walks without blood. Nothing in her veins but air, no organs, hollowed chest. Aeson and Promachus somewhere at play, freed. Walk of the dead, and this must be what it feels like afterward. Severed from all but still walking. Street of rock ground into whited dust. Windy here, whorls in the air. Shade trees bending. Vendors with black skin and baskets of dates shiny golden brown, slick with sugar. Baskets in the shapes of amphoras, as if all things could be repeated in different material, a person made of clay or reed or stone or water.

Narrow street full of sound. Humans come to fill the air, to make no place quiet. Hands reaching for her, holding shapes of root and leaf and orb. Bright colors, red and yellow and green, all without meaning. Strange dismemberments, objects without origin or use. Sound the same, in its own shapes severed and hung unrecognized. Tongues she has never heard. Smells brought together too close, undistinguished.

Small figures in clay, painted in lines red and black. Bulls with wide thin horns, bodies narrowed impossibly like dogs. Standing alert, no heaviness of a bull, no long sideways swing of a head. Figures on thrones, for all to imagine themselves kings. Thrones rounded like baskets, and each king’s head as tiny as a bird’s. Mothers fattened. Faces with opened mouths screaming. Rams with heads thickening.

Women offered for burial, arms become wings upspread, beaked faces, rounded breasts. Women meant for graves. Standing in crowds before her, waiting.

Bronze in hoops and rings and bracelets, trace of each tiny dent and bending and hammer blow, sign of all that is human, shaping figures from nothing, remaking the world. Forms imagined and repeated without end.