WASN’T THE MINOTAUR BURIED HORNS FIRST: VULNERABILITY AND IDENTITY IN THE MYTHIC BODY

ABSTRACT:

Throughout the course of contemporary classic studies much scholarship has been done on the triumph of Theseus in his traversing of the labyrinth and his ill-fated sails. As a result, this poem is concerned with the symbolic significance of the lineage of the semi-bestial mythic body as a contemporary site of identity politics. Throughout this poem it can reasonably be assumed that some discussion of the symbolic barrier of placing a shameful beast inside a series of intraversible walls can stand as a place marker for a decidedly unpopulated and, it follows naturally, unmirrored existence. What can we, as citizens of the poem, learn from a son who has never seen his own face not caked in gore and other casualties of loneliness? In this vein, the poem eschews a beginning in the Aegean Sea in favor of an image of a Biracial child sitting in a lunchroom in Omaha, Nebraska being told by alabaster colored children, who could barely be troubled to acknowledge the beast otherwise, all the sports his blood will make him “a monster” at, and then the boy’s fingers weeping scarlet onto the linoleum his skull freshly crowned with the beginnings of horns.

A POEM ABOUT TREES THAT ISN’T ACTUALLY A POEM ABOUT TREES