Babayaga

It’s not that we’re envious or spiteful, no,

frankly we don’t much care,
Lyda spits out her distaste for Poseidon
in fish scales on the floorboards.
But I am curious, why so many gods come
bullish, hirsute, and bearded?
What bullies and brutes elbowed them there?
Yes, women are tucked in amid your marginalia,
Mary, Sarah, Hagar, Hera, Hestia, I can name each,
sulking there in the testaments’ shadows, outshone
like Diana by Apollo’s ever-bright aura,
or shunted to the side like Jacob’s two patient wives,
waiting there past the river’s ford as he wrestled his angel
the way boys will do, the same way this stupid flea
now wrestles against gravity.
Oh, watch him descend.

Book Three

I’ve come to consider bravery as just about the most pernicious of virtues. Bravery is a horrible thing. The human race has it left over from the animal world and we can’t get rid of it.

—JAMES JONES, The Paris Review

I

Superintendent Maroc had an important errand to run. But he was a procrastinator by nature; in his experience if you put off most things you found in the end you didn’t truly need to do them. But this errand was most likely not going to go away. Yet still, he stalled. He sat behind his desk, watching the big yellow clock tick its way around and listening to the little old detective rattle on: “This was, I don’t know, thirty years ago now, between the wars. I was then working for my father, who was prosperous then.”

“Your family had money?” Maroc said, not really listening.