The Toll of Fame
Loki has traveled to Iceland again.
Loki is not, technically, at home in Iceland,
but it feels right. Better than most places.
It feels, breath woven icy into wind,
like Asgard when he was a child.
Loki knows he is a murder mystery without conclusion
motive or causation.
Hollywood won’t allow him to go back to what he was.
Enough is enough already, he wants to say.
Find someone else to be your antihero.
He turns, back to the mist-held fjord,
land a troll’s ribcage. Bleached bone.
Green cloak dusting kneecaps, fur soft at his clavicle.
He doesn’t always have to look this way.
Doesn’t always have to be Tom.
He can be anyone.
Anything.
But the world has given him this body to inhabit:
lambskin boots dissolving into heat without water.
Heat lightning a reminder of
Thor across a bloody gash in the cosmos.
God, Jotun, Actor, Illusion, Truth—these are all words,
but words can inhibit as much as they can define.
Loki is sour-sweet blueberries against the tongue.
Loki is wine within a piano to better make a bath.
It often still rains in Reykjavík while
the northern towns collapse into snow.
Here, now, over him, the sun only lifts for a few hours a day.
This country, golden for a buttered slice,
bears an uncanny resemblance to a collar clasping a throat.
Repository, or a New Prayer
A blindfold the color of eels or sand pushed rough through stone or air siphoned from a ghost and sold skyward or loneliness metastasizing in the dark or a hand reaching for dirt or melanoma on a beloved forehead or how all kneeling is supplication or a cat o’ nine tails making rivers of a stranger’s back or sex like juniper smells or a lamp’s shadow tricking dying eyes into sight or two starlit boys kissing in secret or a hungriness gathering the last of the milk at the bottom of the bowl to shape an ocean.
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