BOXING PANDORA by Cynthia G. Loveland A project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, UT April 16, 2016 Approved by: Dr. Victoria Ramirez Prof. Brad Ro|h^ar Dr. SalmShigley Loveland |1 A Creative Examination of Women in Mythology At my work Christmas party last year, my boss' mother, a devout religious woman, asked me what I was stud5dng. "1 think mythology is fascinating," she said. "I wonder if anyone still believes in it." "I guess," I responded with some hesitation. "It depends on how you feel about religion. Hindus believe in many gods; Christians believe in one. Each believer probably perceives the other's religion as m)^hology." She blinked. "I'd never thought about it that way before," she said, ending the conversation, but throwing glances and half-smiles at me for the rest of the night, like I had suggested something unholy, which, of course, I had. I remembered that years earlier, a fellow undergrad had argued that women should be subservient to men because it had been that way for too long to be wrong, to which I argued that slavery and rape had also been around for a long time. "I don't know how to answer that," she stammered, "but I'm sure I'm right. I feel it." It is because of interactions like these with women and men, religious or not, that I chose to focus my project on women in mythology and how those historical archetypes still affect us. The driving force behind this project is twofold: 1} the effects I have seen in my own life of growing up in a community that sees women as potential mothers and wives, successful or unsuccessful mothers and wives, or nonmothers and nonwives, and 2) trying to grasp that gift good poets and other creative writers have of allowing readers to see the world from their unique perspectives—like Frank O'Hara's "hum-colored / cabs" (Orr 21) Loveland |2 or Adrienne Rich's "Gush mud and toads" (Rich 11). The first poses an argument too personal to be won, and the second is a work in progress, so I've chosen to explore these ideas as a creative writing project with m)d:hology as the backbone. But m)d:hology, too, makes for a sticky discussion, since it has been written and re-written, partially recovered, or lost completely. Most of the myths we read today are only vaguely reminiscent versions of the uttered originals. In Celtic Gods and Heroes, Sjoestedt writes, "In matters of mythology, as in all historical research, one must sometimes be content with ignorance" (xxi). This project is my effort to explore that contentment and make it personal—filling in the blanks with my own experiences and observations. The Personal Essays I am new to personal essays—both reading and writing them—but I've enjoyed the process of discovery rather more than I thought I would, although deciding where to start was daunting. I've never lived anywhere exotic, I've never survived a newsworthy trauma, never accomplished an5d:hing unique. But after reading several other personal essays from The Best American Essays: 2014, such as Brenner's "Strange Beads," about finding relief from chronic pain in an eclectic jewelry collection auctioned off piecemeal on eBay, and Jamison's "The Devil's Bait," about Morgellons, a hard-to-diagnose skin disorder that the speaker doesn't have, I realized it doesn't have to be about an epic experience. It can be about the way I view a normal experience, which may be different from the way anyone else would view it. In her podcast "How to Write a Kick-Ass Essay," Ann Hood says that one ingredient for a great essay is to remember, "They're about something small, and they're about Loveland |3 something enormous. You have to focus the essay on a small thing and then dig to find the enormous thing beneath it" (Hood). I tried to keep this in mind as I wrote both of my essays, wrapping my moments in larger discoveries—that my name only means what I decide it means; that I am what 1 make myself. 1 also had to decide how to order the scenes in each essay. In You Can't Make This Stuff Up, Gutkind writes, "Focus—the second way you can select and order scenes— represents theme or meaning or thesis, what it is the writer wants the reader to come away with at the end of the reading experience. In order for the scenes to fit together, they should reflect the same of similar themes" (226). This was a struggle with my first essay especially, which takes one experience that lasted little more than minutes, and slices it up to set it against a childhood spent coming to terms with who 1 am and what that means. My second essay was easier, since it is broken into fifteen chronological snapshots depicting moments of varying degrees of powerlessness or powerfulness in my life to give an overall sense of stumbling growth. Both essays began as explorations. It wasn't until I'd written my first drafts that 1 knew what they were about. "Mt. Cynthus" In Making Shapely Fiction, Stern writes, "Single moments—crises, revealing incidents, or epiphanies—make crisp, focused short stories" (48). With this in mind, I wrote a crisp, focused two-page essay called "Mt. Cynthus," about my first lunar eclipse. 1 counted on the subtext to reveal the larger story of a young girl connecting with something bigger and more meaningful than herself. While it painted a pretty picture, 1 felt like it was lacking the connection it needed to something more profound. Loveland |4 I found the solution when I was introduced to the braided essay structure in my Creative Writing: Form & Craft class this fall. Although I'd read several braided essays before, 1 didn't have a name for them, so I couldn't have told you how they were doing what they were doing. My experiences in class, discussing and practicing the form, gave me a deeper appreciation for the braid. 1 found "Chicxulub," by T. C. Boyle, especially effective as the story of the loss (or not) of a daughter, interspersed with mostly informational segments that detailed the devastation caused by extra-solar object strikes. The first piece of my collection, "Mt. Cynthus," (the expanded braid) is my attempt to do something similar, and while it doesn't have the same emotional impact as "Chicxulub," which took my breath away, it takes one moment of contemplation—of connection with something other worldly and braids it in with eighteen years of stumbling, or randoming through my sibling-rich childhood, with some Wonder Woman-themed diary entries sprinkled around to tie in my early fascination with powerful women, and give the essay more variety. The Poems The nine poems in my project are crafted and ordered to represent women at different stages of their lives—from the first time we are touched by loss, to the moment we realize we have gained wisdom in exchange for the physical beauty the world seems to overvalue. As I try to write the kinds of poems that other people can connect with, 1 realize my greatest weakness lies in finding that new and intriguing way to say something that has been said before—a way that will leave the reader breathless—even just for a moment. I've experienced this breathlessness while reading such poems as "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop, and "You Fit into Me" by Margaret Atwood. Both poems say something personal Loveland |5 and relevant, but in a way that is artful instead of awkward. In Beautiful & pointless, Orr writes: One way to explain why poems filled with seemingly personal information don't automatically have a personal effect would be to say that their disclosures can quickly become conventions. The information may still be artfully deployed, and the risk involved is still substantial—but that risk is the normal risk of technical failure, not the peculiar risk of personal embarrassment. (30) With each round of edits, I look for ways to work these awkward conventions out of my poems. The best way I can do that is to let myself get very close to the subject matter initially, then take a step back for the edits—to dissociate myself from any personal experiences I have chosen to write about once they're written. Even so, there remains a nakedness that 1 have to be OK with. 1 considered experimenting with different poetic forms in this project, but for my purpose it seems appropriate to avoid traditional forms, since that is the jist of the project. Traditionally, women have been cornered, walled in, bound, and controlled—formed to suit the purposes of men. So for these poems, I decided to let the lines flow naturally. They are replete with enjambment—phrases flow from line to line and from stanza to stanza— sometimes raw, sometimes more lyrical. There are moments that feel like conversation, and moments of distance to help give the collection a feeling of movement. My own emotional growth hasn't been an upward slope; it is more akin to punctuated equilibrium, with sporadic backslides. Loveland |6 "Smolder" My first poem takes a cataclysmic historic event, the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii, and sets it next to the Challenger shuttle explosion—an event that had a much lower death toll, but a larger impact on my life. It was the moment 1 felt calamity touch me, and I could no longer be unaware of the horrors of mortality, especially since one of the teachers in my high school was a runner-up for the spot Christa McAuliffe ultimately filled on that shuttle. The poem ends with allusions to the speaker's own suffering, which is smaller in comparison to the tragedy of Pompeii, but still painful. As one of my friends once said, "Your broken arm doesn't make my paper cut hurt any less." Szymborska's "A Moment in Troy," does something similar, with its, "Little girls against a backdrop of destruction, / with flaming towns for tiaras, / in earrings of pandemic lament" [Kossman 249), re-telling the destruction of Troy through the eyes of innocents. There is that same embedded idea that these girls are changed by the violence they have witnessed. As 1 was researching for the poem, 1 read that many shrines to Hercules were discovered in Pompeii among the rubble, and I wondered how many Pompeians had called out for him as they burned or choked to death. 1 wondered how many of them died cursing him for not pressing the fire back into the roaring mountain. The idea of waiting for some dreamy demigod to save them from natural disaster (maybe even instead of tr5nng to save themselves) worked well with the theme of my collection. I chose the title, "Smolder," because, though the speaker has been scorched, she is not reduced to ash. She has been touched by calamity, but not destroyed by it. The poem Loveland |7 uses assonance, consonance, and sibilance instead of end rhymes to give it a more lyrical feel without sounding boxed in. The volcanic references run throughout the poem. It has three stanzas, with a caesura before the last sentence of each stanza to give the impression that, while each stanza is discussing a separate event, they are still connected in the mind of the speaker. "If I were making my own mythology" This poem attempts to recreate a feeling of vastness and surpassing freedom. It is also designed to counter the misogyny that runs rampant through contemporary religions, and bleeds over into societal attitudes. In Primitive Mythology, Campbell writes, "It may well be that a good deal of what has been advertised as representing the will of 'Old Man' actually is but the heritage of a lot of old men, and that the main idea has been not so much to honor God as to simplify life by keeping woman in the kitchen" (323]. But the women of this poem are wild and free creatures out of reach of the men who wrote and rewrote scripture to put them in their places. It is designed to answer Ovid's first poem of Metamorphoses, called "The Creation," which begins: Before the earth and the sea and the all-encompassing heaven came into being, the whole of nature displayed but a single face, which men have called Chaos; a crude, unstructured mass, nothing but weight without motion, a general Loveland |8 conglomeration of matter composed of disparate, incompatible elements. (5} Ovid's first god wears a male face, and he completes the poem by creating man. Women are not even mentioned. "If I were making my own mythology" represents an awakening of ideals when viewed as a segment of the whole project. I've never been a fan of long poems, but this is my longest poem in the collection, since I am aiming for something more in the style of an epic poem. What starts as a dreamy musing, ends as a bedtime story. My goal is to leave readers with the idea that myths are shaped to fill a need; they are used to inspire and control people, and with these images, women are taking back control of ourselves. The stanza lengths are arbitrary, the line lengths are arbitrary and the movement of the poem is designed to represent stream of consciousness, like these are great ideas the speaker is coming up with as she speaks with conviction. It ends as a prayer because much mj^hology is regarded as religion. There are some instances of assonance as the goddesses "fling their / rings and hisses and screams" (lines 42-43} and sibilance as they offer "a kiss / from their star-sparkled lips" (lines 43-44}, to create the kinetic energy that drives the lines that 1 felt could have been slow and clunky at times. "Girls' night out" This poem is a response to more of Ovid's lines from Metamorphoses, regarding Apollo's relentless pursuit of Daphne, who he continues to paw at even after she is transformed into a laurel tree to protect her from his unwanted advances: "Tree though she was, Apollo still loved her. Caressing the trunk / with his hand, he could feel the heart still Loveland |9 fluttering under the new bark. / Seizing the branches, as though they were limbs, in his arms' embrace, / he pressed his lips to the wood; but the wood still shrank from his kisses" (Ovid 33}. Maybe this scene was considered romantic at the time it was written, but when 1 read it, 1 am horrified. To this horror, 1 add my own observations as my friends and I navigated dance clubs and bars in our 20s and 30s, appalled at how quickly a man could go from compliments to curses when we rejected their advances, however nicely. Some would quietly remark that we were probably lesbians, others spit their parting words at us with a shocking vehemence—going from charming to crass in .6 seconds. Some got physical. In The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler writes, "And today there is a massive worldwide upsurge of violence against women—not only in fiction, but in fact" (153}. This poem explores the sense of privilege behind that anger and violence from ancient Greece to last night in a bar—and folds them together, noting how the attitudes of some men have not changed in all that time. This poem also represents a back step in the cycle after the empowering images of "If 1 were making my own mythology." But it isn't a concession either. It's just a darker take on where women stand in comparison with the idealistic all-goddess scenario of the previous poem. The language is gritty and raw. While 1 could have created the scene without the strong language, 1 wanted readers to feel the same disgust the speaker feels. 1 wanted them to imagine the thumping music, the half-light of the bar, the surprise at the unwarranted anger. The poem is broken into four stanzas of eight lines each, with the middle line of the second stanza dropped to indicate the sudden disconnect in the conversation between the Loveland |10 speaker and her suitor. Since seven often represents perfection across different forms of m3d:hology, I overshot that by one line to indicate the lack of perfection—because nobody's perfect. Biblically, four represents completion, so 1 chose four stanzas to represent a complete cycle—complete imperfection. "But she's not answering the phone" This next poem in the collection follows "Girls' Night Out" as a still-frame of the aftermath of unfulfilled desire—maybe even the morning after a night out with the girls. The woman in the poem is a modern Pandora who has opened her box, and is now suffering the disappointment of her unrealized hopes. As Edmundson writes, "Aristotle said that the basic feeling of being alive is an ongoing mild unpleasantness" (224), which I believe (and Buddha agrees) is due to our unmet expectations. Many women, especially in places where conservative religions thrive, suffer from the feeling that they can never quite measure up—they go about their duties with a simmering sense of dissatisfaction. 1 remember that feeling, of pushing myself almost past my limits and still knowing I wasn't doing enough to be a good mother. A good wife. It also quietly says that being alone doesn't have to mean being lonely. Estes writes, "Long ago, the word alone was treated as two words, all one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily" (316). I love that idea—that being in a relationship divides you. You have another person's schedule, tastes, and goals to account for. Often, the needs and desires of one half of the relationship take a back seat to the needs and desires of the other half. Loveland |11 This poem represents the belly of the whale of the series. Since the subject is absent, it is passively unhappy. The structure of this poem is simple. The stanzas are short, and the lines are short—creating series of photograph-like rectangles. Though this poem is probably my least favorite of the collection, 1 like what it's trying to say. 1 like the picture it is trying to paint, which is of an empty room, with the main character off somewhere else, perhaps in the bathtub in the next room, perhaps staring down a bottle of sleeping pills. With her gone, readers get to see her leavings—the remains of all her failed dreams. "Iphigenia leaves home" Iphigenia's innocent question to her father, "Shall 1 sail thither with my mother or alone" (Euripides) sparked this poem. She has complete faith in her father, and her mother has a complete inability to protect her. My daughter was my first and second (and only) child to need stitches. She's been in two car accidents, she's covered in scars from leaping before she looks, and still she remains undaunted. She runs when she should be walking, jumps when she should be standing, but accepts responsibility for all her choices, regardless of the outcome. She's my Iphigenia. She's the one 1 worry about when she walks out the front door. The title for this poem is currently "Iphigenia leaves home," but it feels a little too on the nose. As of now, I'm searching for a better title, although the obvious title seems to have worked for Jeannine Hall Galley in Becoming the ViUainess, which is a collection of poems with titles like "Playing Softball with Persephone" (12), and "Cinderella at the Car Dealership" (41). "Iphigenia leaves home" is unrhymed with four stanzas of six lines each, the lines getting shorter, the pacing quicker, the tone more intense in the last stanza to give Loveland |12 a sense of the speaker's anxiety as her daughter walks "from / the door to your Jeep on the street" (lines 22-23]. The last two words drop, but remain in line with the previous line to indicate a drop in speech—a final plea as the speaker's daughter carries her suitcase to the street. "Only love me dearly" We women are bloody beings—we bleed each month in concert with the cycle of the moon, and each period of menstruation is the evacuation of a body unmade—a little destruction, a little pain and discomfort, a little loss. In Primitive Mythology, Campbell writes, "The coincidence of the menstrual cycle with that of the moon is a physical actuality structuring human life and a curiosity that has been observed with wonder" (58). The association with the goddess and blood is only natural, and makes Kali a great subject for a poem about the duality of motherhood. She is a bloody goddess who wears a necklace of skulls and a skirt of severed arms, but she is regarded as a loving mother. "Only love me dearly" is a line from the meditation before the Blessed Sacrament, which sometimes is associated with Kali. 1 like this muddling of m5d:hologies—Christian and Hindu—and so chose that phrase for the title of this poem, which is the shortest in my collection, composed of five three-line stanzas. The five stanzas represent my five children, and the three lines in each stanza are "the symbolic representation of Om whose three curves represent the three states of consciousness of human beings, and is represented by 3 sounds—A-U-M" (Shah). 1 found this fitting since the poem is about a Hindu goddess/plain old mother asking her children to forgive her for those moments when she loses control. Loveland |13 "Walking Across the Street" I've written this poem a dozen different times in a dozen different ways. It's been an elegy, a sonnet, a gritty rant, and a sestina, but none of them felt right, probably because they were attacking the subject head on. My brother died. My little brother died. Goddammit, my baby brother died. But I feel like I have to keep writing it until I get it right because, "To leave the dead wholly dead is rude'" (Lepore 7), so I keep writing about him—he's a short story, he's an essay, he's many poems. After poring over all the other versions that didn't quite work, I decided a better way to deal with the subject of this loss is to put some distance between us—the width of a uncrossable river—he is there, just beyond my reach, but I placed him in the world of mythology where he will never really be gone. Szymborska takes the mystery and intrigue out of this crossing to the afterlife in "On the Banks of the Styx," which begins: Dear individual soul, this is the Styx. The Styx, that's right: Why are you so perplexed? As soon as Charon reads the prepared text over the speakers, let the nymphs affix your name badge and transport you to the banks. (Kossman 108) As "Walking Across the Street" attempts to set that final crossing up as something casual, beautiful, almost relaxing, "On the Banks of the Stjoc" turns the banks of the river into something like a train station, with Styx shouting orders to keep the dead on schedule. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell writes, "The realm of gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know" (217). I've often amused myself by wondering Loveland |14 which afterlife is waiting for us when we're done here (if any). Will our dead eyes widen when the Valkyrie whisk us off to Valhalla? Will we sit silently in the bottom of the boat as Charon rows us across the river St}^? Will white-winged angels open the Pearly Gates for us? Will we sprout out of our graves as nymphs and dryads and naiads? Will we sparkle into starstufi? 1 settled on the title, "Walking Across the Street," because it opens and ends the poem with the image of a woman walking away from what she can't reclaim, moving on with her life. This mourning poem is posed as three questions of decreasing lengths to represent the unknown nature of the afterlife (an unanswered question) and the lack of answers (the diminishing questions). It has five stanzas of five lines each, with a two-line stanza at the end, simply because my brother was twenty-seven years old when he died. "Hagborn" As an undergrad, 1 happened upon a book of art in the library at Weber State. Many of the photographs included were of men and women well past their primes. The photographer's lighting accentuated, instead of softened, their wrinkles—highlighted the dimming of their eyes, the sagging of their features. 1 thought they were some of the most stunning photographs I've ever seen. "Hagborn" is written with those photos in mind—to throw light onto the things that are conventionally considered ugly as a reminder that ever3^hing is beautiful if you look at it the right way. The hag was once considered wise and powerful, the wrinkles and sagging skin were markers of wisdom. They were their own kind of beauty, deeper than eyeliner and lipstick. Loveland |15 This poem explores this gradual, gritty realization, that while age is the loss of youth and beauty, it is also the steps along the path of enlightenment, as if we cannot be beautiful and wise at the same time. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell writes, "Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new" (16}. Though this poem was not written in response to that statement, it does echo the sentiment towards the end as the speaker is consumed by the hag and reborn—given a second chance to make wiser choices, to leap out of the pyre, to break free from her hanging cage. It is broken into five stanzas of seven lines each, and uses repetition to mimic myth: "1 see me in her left eye, now / and then forever. 1 see me in her right eye / from the ending back." [lines 16-18), and so forth. The last line employs assonance: "like hope from an opened box" [line 30), to conclude the poem in more lyrical tone. "Ley Lines" Ley lines are lines of magnetic alignment that connect places of historical significance—places purported to hold or channel Earth magic. 1 can't remember the first time I heard about them, but after re-discovering them for this project, they've been cropping up in television shows 1 watch like The Librarians and Sleepy Hollow, and the movie. Midnight Special. Ley lines are not specific to women, but they recur across mythologies, and fit in with the rest of my project, since Earth magic tends to be associated with femininity. They can be empowering or destructive, depending on how the power derived from their conjunction is used. Loveland |16 This poem is about facing the things that terrify us most and surviving them. In Self and Soul, Edmundson writes, "Real exercise of courage is dangerous. We want to hop and blink and live a long time—live forever it possible" [249). But we can't blink our way past a challenge, because a large part of each victory is what we learn from the mistakes we make before we win—of the strength we gain from fighting our way to where we want or need to be. This poem is written in four stanzas of seven lines each, since according to Clarissa Estes in Women Who Run with the Wolves, "Seven is oft considered a woman's number, a mystical number synonymous with the division of the moon cycle into four parts and equal to menses; waxing, half, full, and waning" (319). The four stanzas represent the completion of the cycle—a battle or challenge won. The lines get shorter at the end—more urgent—to give the feeling of a pep-talk or the re-telling of a great battle. They are designed to mimic the breathlessness and urgency that come with the excitement of a great victory. I believe this is the strongest poem of the collection. "With a Look of Dreadful Love" My second essay, and last piece of the collection, opens with Eve—or me as Eve— curious, but ultimately obedient. It addresses the fluidity of our personalities and the addition of traits or aspects as we move through both positive and negative experiences. 1 examine this growth through the many faces of the goddesses—the kind and loving faces, the raging, bloody faces. Sjoestedt writes, "The female type is that of a mother-goddess, single and triple, local divinities, goddess of seasonal beasts, animal goddess, mothers and teachers, incarnations of natural forces of fertility or destruction, for the series of'mothers' Loveland |17 merges into that of goddesses of slaughter so that one cannot establish a clear opposition between them" (93). Because many goddesses are both creator and destroyer, it makes sense to use them to examine the bipolar nature of motherhood. As a mother, I have worn many aspects. I have held my children as they cried, 1 have raged at the people who hurt them (and in my less proud moments, raged at my children). 1 have spent sleepless nights agonizing over decisions that I knew would change their lives, so sure I was unqualified to make a decision of that magnitude. Often, all these aspects emerge at once and I am a stomping monster, full of love and rage and fear. "With a Look of Dreadful Love" shows the ever-evolving nature of humanity, of woman, of mother, of me. Last summer, I took a Writing Short Fiction class, during which 1 was instructed to write a short story or essay, then cut the word count down by half. I struggled with this assignment, because I'm already a concise writer, and felt like I'd written just enough words to say what 1 needed to say. In the end, 1 cut my story down by exactly half, since I'm a stickler for rules, and had a much stronger story because of it. I've employed that kind of literary culling in this essay to make short, succinct passages to create a larger story. This essay calls on women of mythologies from a variety of cultures, to give the impression that there is something that connects us all even if we don't realize it— something along the lines of Jung's, '"collective unconscious'—that is, that part of the psyche which retains and transmits the common psychological inheritance of mankind"(Franz 98). It is set up as a series of disconnected, but chronological moments, giving the reader the opportunity to feel as though they are flipping through the pages of a scrapbook or scanning a group of photos scattered across the counter as he or she reads Loveland |18 it—images of me with an overexposed goddess in the background, her arms wrapped around me. The End Product The theme of this project is that though myth is life blown out of proportion, there is truth in all of it—a truth of belief or passion or whatever the creators and believers of each type of m3d:hology need at that moment. For these years in which it is essential, it is a compelling story that adapts and flourishes before it slinks quietly off into the history books to remain as a marker, a reminder, a glimpse into the heart of what came before. But such transitions are never smooth, and when Christians began overwriting other myths, it caused misunderstanding, tension, and war. It continues to be the source of oppression. As Campbell writes: The myths of the differing civilizations have sensibly varied throughout the centuries and broad reaches of mankind's residence throughout the centuries and broad reaches of mankind's residence in the world, indeed to such a degree that the 'virtue' of one mythology has often been the 'vice' of another, and the heaven of one the other's hell. {The Masks of God 18) And that speaks to the focus of my project. What serves the purpose of one party, generally ends up compromising the interests of another. I can't rewrite Genesis or put Pandora back in her box. 1 can't tame Kali or call a time out to swap Zeus for Inanna, slapping each other's asses as they pass, but I can offer my own interpretations of those myths in a way that I hope speaks to readers. Loveland |19 Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. "You Fit into Me." Poemhunter.com. Web. 10 Apr. 2016. Bishop, Elizabeth. "One Art." Poetry Foundation. Web. 10 Apr. 2016. Boyle, T. Coraghessan. "Chicxulub." The New Yorker. Mar. 1, 2004. Web. 29 Mar. 2016. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972. Print. —. The Masks of God. New York: Viking, 1959. Print. Campbell, Joseph, and Antony Van Couvering. The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959- 1987. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Print. Edmundson, Mark. Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals. United States of America: Harvard UP, 2015. Print. Eisler, Riane Tennenhaus. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Cambridge: Harper & Row, 1987. Print. Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine, 1992. Print. Euripides. "Iphigenia at Aulis." The Internet Classics Archive. Web. 2 Apr. 2016. Gailey, Jeannine Hall. Becoming the Villainess. Bowling Green, KY: Steel Toe, 2006. Print. Gutkind, Lee. You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction—from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between. Boston, MA: Da Capo/Lifelong, 2012. Print. Hood, Ann. "How to Write a Kick-Ass Essay." Tin House Workshop Podcasts. Tin House. 26 Sept. 2014. Radio. Loveland |20 Works Cited (contO Franz, Marie-Louise von, Joseph L. Henderson, jolandi Jacobi, and Aniela Jaffe. Man and His Symbols. Ed. C. G. Jung. New York: Dell, 1968. Print. Kossman, Nina. Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Lepore, Jill. The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Vintage, 2015. Print. Orr, David. Beautiful & pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Print. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. David Raeburn. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems, 1950-2001. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Print. Sexton, Anne, and Barbara Swan. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Print. Shah, Priyanka. "6 Sacred Numbers in Hinduism." TopYaps. 2014. Web. 01 Apr. 2016. Sjoestedt, Marie-Louise. Celtic Gods and Heroes. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000. Print. Sullivan, John Jeremiah, ed. The Best American Essays: 2014. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Print. Loveland |21 Mt. Cynthus Finding out that Earth has a shadow is like finding out that your mom was sexy once. At ten years old, I just never would have imagined it But according to our massive set of coffee-brown encyclopedias, that's what a lunar eclipse was—the moon passing into Earth's hulking shadow. # May 21,1981 Today 1 discovered Wonder Woman sprinting through the pages of a fat comic book Richard brought home from the school library, no doubt for one of its studlier superheroes. Her blue-black hair was offset to her hairlines, the printing press just a little skiwampus. Drawn in by the improbability of her outfit, her golden tiara, her stylish boots, I read every single story, reading and re-reading the Wonder Woman bits, until my brother took the book back and threatened to behead my stuffed unicorn if I took it again. To make myself feel better, I ran around the field behind our house to see if I could get my hair to blow out behind me like Wonder Woman's does, but Mom puts so much Dippity-do in it, it wouldn't even blow back in a tornado. # 1 wasn't stupid. The only complaint my teachers ever had at parent/teacher conferences was that 1 read in class—one caught me with a copy of A Wrinkle in Time hidden in my textbook, another, turning the pages of A Horse and His Boy with the toe of my hand-me-down shoe. Loveland |22 "I know/' my mother said at one such conference. "She's already ruined her eyes reading under her covers at night." I pushed my glasses up my nose, the fist-sized round frames brushing against my eyelashes. I had pulled them off the wall of frames at the glasses shop because they said DIANA on the inside of the earpiece. Diana was Wonder Woman's alter ego. Wonder Woman was strong, independent, and beautiful—ever5d:hing 1 wasn't. My DIANA glasses made me feel like I could take on the world, because nothing could stop Wonder Woman, really. No matter how messy things got, she always kicked ass, her perpetually-neat hair shining off the comic book pages. And though my glasses made me look like more like a curious owl than a kick-ass superhero, 1 almost didn't hear the other kids yelling "four eyes" through my glasses-given alter ego as 1 walked down the hallways at school. "Refuse means garbage," 1 offered, because I couldn't think of anything else to say. I'd learned that from Nancy Drew. She wasn't particularly strong or anything, but she was plucky and smart. My teacher smiled. My mom didn't look at me. "We're not talking about garbage," Mom said. She liked to stay on task because she was always busy. 1 don't remember ever seeing her idle her time away—collapsing, maybe, into an involuntary nap mid-moming, soft, desperate snores tearing out of her half-open mouth for ten or fifteen minutes before her eyelids fluttered open again, but never just sitting around. She didn't watch soap operas, and she didn't chit-chat with her friends on the phone. She'd had ten kids in thirteen years and made everything from scratch—even our underwear. And she ground wheat into flour for our bread like the Little Red Hen, Loveland |23 except that she always shared, no matter how little we helped. She packed our school lunches—twenty slices of homemade bread, ten dollops of peanut butter, ten hard-boiled eggs, and ten baggies of carrot sticks. My baby brother got a sack lunch even though he was too young for school. He waved goodbye and told us to "have a day nice," as we scattered to our various bus stops in the morning. # It was July 5,1982, and I'd never seen a lunar eclipse before. My German ancestors called it Mondfinstemis, which means dark moon. Ancient Greeks called it a sign from the gods. In 585 B.C.E. it stopped a war. In 1504 A.D. Columbus used it to manipulate the Arawak into thinking he was some kind of god or sorcerer, but 1 got stuck on the Earth's shadow bit. From the same set of encyclopedias that told me that Earth had a shadow, 1 discovered my name was derived from Mt. Cynthus, where the moon goddess Diana was born, and I knew 1 had to see this lunar eclipse, bedtime be damned. # September 29,1982 The cool thing about Wonder Woman, is yeah... she's curvy and tall—a hot, smart brunette bundle of fireworks, but she has morals and she's brave, which is something no one my age knows anything about. As a matter of fact, girls my age are almost always either mean or spastic, or spastically mean, and boys my age are gross and rude. If 1 had an invisible jet, I'd fly it away from school every morning—away from my flop-footed awkwardness, the bullying, the mean girls who know more about the world than I do and make sure 1 remember it, Monday through Friday. Loveland |24 Dad was walking home from work when he saw a kid knock a smaller kid off his bike and chase him down an alleyway with a knife. Without thinking, Dad chased them both down the alley and confronted the bigger kid—stood there looking imposing until the bigger kid left. Who does that in real life? What weaponless person chases a knife-wielding punk down an alley? Some people don't need an invisible jet. # At eight years old, I was all feet, hair, and teeth. We moved too much for me to make any lasting friendships. Books were my respite from the stress of always being the awkward new kid. Here, in Nacogdoches, Texas, Ms. Adams, the librarian, was my best friend. My teachers appreciated that 1 did my homework and kept my head down. My world view was limited to what 1 saw at home, church, and school. My grandmother had given me an African paper doll for my birthday a couple of years earlier, and 1 thought it was something make-believe—a dark-skinned fairy, maybe. When my parents let us choose a restaurant to go to, I chose Burger King because I didn't know there was an5d:hing else besides McDonalds, and Burger King seemed like the classier choice. When my brother chose Church's Fried Chicken, 1 felt foolish, but it was too late to do anything about it. I'd already wasted my choice. 1 think that was the moment I realized 1 didn't know anything about anything, no matter how many books I'd read. # I asked my mom if I could stay out late to watch to lunar eclipse and she said "no" without even turning around. Loveland |25 "But—" I said, hefting the encyclopedia towards her, just in case she didn't know how amazing a lunar eclipse was. "You'll fall asleep anyway," she said. "You're too young to be out that late." I set the book on the kitchen table—the one my dad had crafted from piece of wood the size of a twenty-person raft—and sniffed the warm kitchen air, trying to come up with a workable argument. My disappointment deepened with every sniff. Mom had put onions in the goulash again. 1 wasn't in the mood to argue anymore. # August 11,1983 Today Richard told me that Wonder Woman isn't an Amazon, but 1 told him she most definitely was an Amazon princess and she came from Paradise Island and Hippol5d:a was her mother. He said Amazons only had one... thing. He cupped his hands over his chest and then dropped one. He said they burned off anything that would get in the way of firing their bow and arrows when they hit puberty. I couldn't imagine Wonder Woman as some sort of lopsided boobclops, and according to the comics, there were definitely two, so 1 told him 1 was going to ask Mom about it. He didn't like that at all, so he stole my stuffed unicorn until 1 promised not to, because she definitely didn't know anything about Amazons and she couldn't even shoot a bow and arrow. When 1 didn't promise not to talk to her, he threatened to tell her 1 was sneak-watching The Dukes of Hazard while she was at the store, even though he was the one who Loveland |26 turned it on in the first place. He said Mom wouldn't believe me no matter what 1 said, because I peeked at my birthday presents and so 1 wasn't a reliable source of information. And then he told me that Amazons were all dead, although 1 still think there could be some hiding in the jungle somewhere that we just don't know about. He finally drop-kicked Rainbowmaker back to me, no worse for wear, except a bent horn, and told me Daisy Duke wasn't an Amazon either, which I already knew for sure. # I don't know how my father's voice rates on the international scale of vocal awesomeness, but 1 think it's the most beautiful tenor voice I've ever heard. My childhood was filled with music—mostly songs by Kenny Rogers, The Statler Brothers, The Oakridge Boys, The Carpenters, and the soundtrack to A Fiddler on the Roof. Sometimes my mom would play the piano and we would sing—some of us attempting to harmonize, others just belting out the wrong words off key. Sometimes my dad would tell us stories, accompanied by simple chord progressions on the piano, or play the guitar and sing. My favorite song, next to "Oh Danny Boy," was "Beautiful Brown Eyes." It was lovely and sad at the same time. "Beautiful, beautiful brown eyes," he'd sing. "I'll never love blue eyes again." My blue-or hazel-eyed siblings didn't love the song as much as I did. My eyes, my brother told me, are the color of poop. Still, 1 loved it when Dad sang "Beautiful Brown Eyes," except the line, Willie my darlin'I love you, because who was Willie anyway? Was Willie dude or a chick? Why was my dad singing about some guy named Willie? Tomorrow we might have been married, he sang, but random has kept us apart. That part was strange too—that something like "random" could keep people apart, but 1 didn't Loveland |27 look it up because I didn't need to. I learned most of my vocabulary contextually—like "refuse" from Nancy Drew. Random was something that kept people from loving each other. Obviously. Maybe a drug habit or frizzy hair. # It was still warm when 1 tiptoed out the back door and picked my way over the gravel driveway and into the field behind our house, dragging my blanket behind me. I wasn't worried about copperheads this late. Dad said they liked to sleep when the sun went down, and he knew pretty much everything. Still, 1 watched my feet rise and fall in the moonlight, lifted my blanket a little higher. So far, the moon looked flat and white, but my brother had promised it would do something special just after midnight, and he almost never lied. # January 16,1984 I day-dreamed about the invisible jet again today during math class—mostly just me flying away with Wonder Woman, two old chums laughing over some inside joke with my family members gawking up at us as we soar off into the sky, our legs dangling off invisible seats. Sometimes she let me fly so she could rest—not that she needed rest—she was just being nice. It always ended the same way—us landing on Paradise Island, and Hippolyta welcoming me home with open arms. 1 was finally where 1 belonged, with my bow-wielding, definitely two-breasted sisters. Of course they had to teach me how to shoot, but I'm fast. I'm a sprinter in track, and I play volleyball and basketball. 1 wonder if they'd have Loveland |28 an Amazon basketball team. There would absolutely be foot-races, because that's how Wonder Woman won her way off Paradise Island. And that's how I'd win my way there. # I was pretty sure there were no other kids in my school named Cynthia. I'd never heard of anyone called Cynthia before who was under the age of eighty. Mom was in the kitchen, punching bread dough into hissy submission with her work-weathered knuckles when I asked where my name had come from. "Well let's see," she said. "Carolyn is a family name, John is named after your father and his father and his father, Richard is a family name, Cynthia—we picked that name at random—" She kept talking, but I wasn't even listening anymore. At random, I thought. They picked my name at random and she was telling me just like that. I was as astonished to discover that my parents didn't love me as I was at the casual nature in which my mom informed me. She finished relaying the history of Naming Her Children with a smile on her face, but I only knew that most were family names, Jennifer sounded pretty and my name was picked at random. # As the penumbra inched further onto the pale face of the moon, it grew darker and redder toward the shadowed edge—second contact—the penumbra dragging its umbra behind it like a dog on a leash. I abandoned my blanket to scale the trunk of a tree, planted Loveland |29 my foot in the low crook and launched myself higher to get a few feet closer to the sky, but the thick, leafy branches still obscured the shadowing moon. # March 9,1985 Today 1 really needed those magical bullet-repelling bracelets as rubber bands and other debris whizzed past my head on the looooong bus ride home. There were no seats left so I had to stand in the middle of the aisle, stumbling back and forth as the bus lurched towards my house like a giant, grunting beast. No one was throwing things at me per se, but it's hard not to take a Coke-bottle hit to the head personally when a whole busload of kids is guffawing about it # Had I kicked too much? Not enough? Maybe some chemical incompatibility with my forming cells had made my mom sick while I was in utero and she had pre-hated me before 1 was born. I sloth-walked to the room 1 shared with my little sisters, picked up a book, buried my face in it and ruined my eyes trying to read through the tears that fell onto my owl-eyed glasses. I couldn't figure out how 1, the fourth of ten children, had earned this lack of love. Did Dad find me on the side of the road with infected eyes and bring me home just until I got better like Mittens? But everyone loved Mittens, and though Dad had said "just until she gets better," she was still with us. Family legend had it that while 1 was being born, Richard was in the car, honking the horn. As far as I knew, childbirth took hours—days even. What was he doing in the car while my mom was giving birth to me? He was barely one at the Loveland |30 time. My Nancy Drew-inspired detective skills kicked in and 1 decided they must have seen some old refuse in a gutter on the way home from something, pulled over to see what was wriggling in the dirty blankets, and that was when my brother honked the horn. "This looks like a... Cynthia," my mom had said randomly. At least they had brought me home. # I kept climbing until I was high enough in the breezy branches to make my mother catch her breath if she would have seen me—if she would have known I was trying to touch the moon instead of burrowing under my blankets with a flashlight and a book. I imagined I was Mowgli, sleeping in the jungle, the branches wrapped around me like the arms of a loving Gaia, lulled by Bagheera's steady breathing, except I was awake and aware, my heart beating in syncopation to the chirps and barks of the green tree frogs. I imagined I was Meg Murry, tessering off to another part of the universe, through the moon like it was nothing more than an open door. I imagined the moon was filled with centaurs. # September 1,1986 Why is starting at a new school the hardest thing in the world? My clothes aren't right here—Washington and Utah may as well be on entirely different continents. I can't break into sports in this mammoth school—all these girls have been playing together since they were five—and my credits aren't even transferring over right, since Washington is on a trimester system and Utah is on a semester system. I was really excited about the interpretive dance gym class I signed up for, but I really didn't know that you're not Loveland |31 supposed to wear underwear with a leotard, and my white, homemade granny panties hanging out of my black leotard was pretty hilarious, 1 guess. I would have known that if Mom had let me take ballet classes like I wanted to. To be fair. Wonder Woman never had panty lines. 1 should have paid attention. It's going to take a while for me to live this down. Way to get off on the wrong foot. # 1 thought about the baby in the gutter thing so much, 1 almost accepted it as truth, but 1 couldn't ask my parents for confirmation, so my fiction-fed imagination continued to run wild. In my quest to decipher my pre-birth unlovability, 1 read stories about abandoned babies or secret princesses. Just to make sure 1 wasn't a princess, I put a pea under my mattress. 1 didn't feel a thing. An uncooked split pea. Nothing. It took a small potato to disturb my sleep, and only for a little while. Maybe it wasn't who 1 was born to or how 1 was found. Maybe it was when I was born that made me unlovable. Monday's child is fair of face, 1 read. Jennifer was born on a Monday. Her name sounded pretty and she was definitely grandma's favorite. Tuesday's child is full of grace. 1 was not a Tuesday's child any more than I was a princess. I was all elbows and knees and I was born on a Saturday. Saturday's child works hard for a living. That was rotten. Who cursed all Saturday children to lifelong labor via a line in a poem? Why were some kids full of grace and others full of woe? Further reading revealed that Saturday was named after Saturn, who had castrated his father and eaten his own children. How do you recover from being born on the day of eternal hard workers—of castrators of fathers and eaters of babies? Loveland |32 # And, like I was caught in some slow-motion movie scene, the moon ambered and moved towards me, puffing up to exceed my expectations, like 1 was the only child in a tree in Nacogdoches, Texas, reaching her arms out to the sky. 1 held my breath at the absolute transformation, leaned back against bits of broken bark and breathed out my prepubescent worries as the moon reached third contact—totality—and rounded like the throat of a tree frog before a chirp. # October 30,1986 Mom said 1 can't ever be Wonder Woman for Halloween, no matter how many times I ask her, because her outfit is too trashy, and besides, how would 1 hold it up? louche Mom. Everyone agrees with you. Today Ryan called me a pirate's treasure, and I thought he was flirting with me until he whispered sunken chest in my ear and ran off laughing to tell his friends how funny he was. 1 don't think I'm ever going to get breasts. Til be a stick my whole life. # Or maybe it was where 1 was born, which was Sturgis, South Dakota. A classmate told me that was where bikers went every year for a big, rowdy reunion, and asked if my parents were bikers. 1 giggled at the thought of my dad on a chromed-out hog, my mom riding behind him with her arms around his leather-wrapped waist, but that was the farthest from who they were. Maybe a lady biker gave birth to me in Sturgis, but didn't have a baby seat for her motorcycle. Maybe my brother honked the horn when my parents ran Loveland |33 into the sleazy backroads diner to get me from the biker lady before she rode home without me. If that was it, I decided to be the most amazing abandoned biker baby they ever took home. # 1 wrapped my arms around my knees, leaned back against the softly swaying branch, my chin tilted up, barely blinking for fear I would miss the subtle shifts above me. As slowly as it had stolen onto the face of the moon, the shadow slipped off. A bow, a wave, a smiling thank you very much thank you thank you. When the last thumbprint of shadow had disappeared, 1 shimmied back down the tree, shivering now from something more than the cooling night air. # February 12,1987 I've always known that there are no superheroes, but today we were at a gas pump when a car broke down in the middle of the intersection in front of us. Dad didn't even hesitate. He jumped out of the car, ran into the street and started pushing these two much younger, much stronger kids off to the side of the road in their car. As he came back to our car, he ripped open his blue plaid shirt, the snaps popping like Pop Rocks, and slung it over his shoulder, his chest heaving under his sweaty T-shirt. The whole thing took less than ten minutes, and maybe Mom forgot I was in the back seat, but just before Dad opened the door, she kind of whispered, "my Superman," and 1 thought that was probably the most amazing and accurate thing I'd ever heard her say. Loveland |34 I remembered that Dad had probably saved a kid's life a few years earlier—at the very least, he kept him from getting stabbed—and I decided then and there that he was the closest thing to a real-life superhero. And maybe 1 wasn't Wonder Woman, but I guess 1 could push a car out of the street if 1 needed to. # It was hard for feet, hair and teeth to stand out in a crowd, especially a crowd of siblings with family names or names that sounded pretty. 1 wrote a poem, but it was depressing. I drew a picture of a horse, but it looked like I had traced it. I was picked for the all-region choir, but we moved before 1 got to participate—anyway, my brother starred in the school musical, so what was one alto in a stupid all-region choir? 1 made honor roll, but so did everyone else in the family. I won the local spelling bee, but the regional competition was on a Sunday and my family didn't do stuff like that on the Sabbath. 1 randomed through two elementary schools, two junior high schools and three high schools. I randomed through friends and boyfriends. By the time 1 figured out that my dad had said "ramblin"' not "random"—that my mother had never actually said, "we don't love you," or "we almost ran over you in the middle of the night" or "your biker mom didn't have a baby bitch seat," it was too late. I'd spent too many years being random. I'd snuck out of the house, gotten caught smoking, worn mini-skirts, and read dirty books. I'd sworn too much, drunk too much, and smoked pot in car washes with people 1 thought were my friends. 1 wasn't on the honor roll anymore. # Loveland |35 I snuck in the back door, threw my pants on the floor, climbed into bed, and pulled the covers over my head, but I wasn't clutching a book this time. I was scribbling on a sketchpad, trying to recreate the dimensionality, the sheer realness of the amber moon I'd just witnessed. I was trying to capture in graphite the awe 1 had felt as the moon turned to a semi-precious stone, suspended in millennial twinkles, had inhaled until it was a hazel-faced iris—^Artemis' eye winking at the girl who had been named after her birthplace. Diana's eye. Wonder Woman's eye. # July 31,1988 You definitely can't run in high heels no matter how tough you are, and no Amazon would ever choose to wear them—especially if she were expecting a fight. 1 know, because Dad bought me my first pair of heels yesterday and for the first five minutes, I thought they made me look (dare I say) mature and beautiful. Let's be honest—with the shiny purple dress Mom made for me, I pretty much felt like a goddess. But in true Cynthia fashion, I tripped over air, and as 1 was sprawled all over the ground in the most undignified pose possible, I realized it's all bullshit anyway. Every female superhero I've ever seen is a ridiculously improbable fiction. Fucking unlikely wardrobe alert: superheroes don't fight crime in their panties. # The years that followed are murky almost-memories. I was excommunicated from my church because my dad was a bishop and one of his congregation saw me smoking. At the church court, which I failed to attend, my father showed the church council members Loveland |36 my senior picture and told them I was a good person, but they decided that my indiscretion had a bigger impact than it normally would, due to my father's position. Two guys in suits showed up at my door a week or so later with an official letter, telling me 1 was no longer a member of their church. 1 stopped talking to my family, 1 didn't sleep, I was paranoid and underweight and 1 lost my job because 1 wouldn't fuck the manager. 1 slept on my friends' couches. I knew what it meant to be hungry. 1 stopped reading. Newton's first law of motion is that every object in a state of motion tends to remain in that state unless an external force is applied to it. 1 was heading towards an event horizon until 1 got pregnant, and then cigarettes made me sick, booze made me sick, my pot-smoking, LSD-dropping, cocaine-snorting friends made me sick. 1 named my external force, Jaed. Slowly at first, then faster, I bounced back from what my doctor assured me was certain death at the hands of an eating disorder or drugs or recklessness. I tried to make sure my children were born on weekdays. I chose their names with care. I looked up the meanings and made sure their first names flowed with their middle and last names. I added the letters together to make sure the numerology was favorable, even though I didn't believe in it. 1 rejected names of people who seemed like assholes. 1 didn't name anyone Cynthia. Nothing was picked at random. My daughters know that 1 love them. My sons know that 1 love them. # In the morning, my midnight scribbles looked nothing like the silent exchange between me and the moon, and the Mondfinsternis would remain a memory that haunted Loveland |37 me into adulthood. The smell of whole grain pancakes and homemade S5a'up wafted through the open door and my notepad flopped to the floor, nothing more than insignificant scribbles as I scrambled for my pants on the floor next to my bed. Loveland |38 Smolder We moved north after Mount St. Helens erupted, sending magma to ungodly heights, sending smoke to godly heights. But we only heard the tellers re-telling, choking on memories with dust in their eyes, and 1 said it could have been so much worse as the Pompeians would tell you if their mouths weren't stuffed full of ash. Two years later, the Challenger shuttle erupted somewhere southeast of my Washington State high school, shattering our serenity, showering down fragments of exploded hope, opening our adulthoods to the background vocals of Mister Mister singing "Take these broken wings," and we watched from our wood and metal desks, tracing Tracy loves Spencer or Mr. Calver sucks dick with our erasable-pen-calloused fingers, while the teachers whispered and wept in the hallways. I've never been to Pompeii, never choked on the smoke and fire of natural or unnatural disaster. I've never cried to the gods to send their winged warriors over my burning body, never wrapped my arms around my child as he shuddered out his last raspy breath, never downed one more sip of sooty wine, wondering where my Hercules was. But I've shaken off the ash of my marriage, faced the fire of accusation, rested a hand on my son's sloping shoulder as tears slipped down his chin. 1 have sipped at the simmering brimstone in the dregs at the bottom of my cup. Loveland |39 If I were making my own mythology I would fill it with badass ladies who ride on broad dragon backs, their skirts flowing into those hot black, beating wings, hair blowing back, away from their soot-stained faces, away from their narrowed eyes, away from their outstretched hands the colors of supernovae, their thoughts streaming behind them like the tails of comets, like interstellar noise. And 1 would call one goddess morning, or daybreak, or Dawn, give her the big dipper for a tea cup, the moon for an earring. She would wear the ozone like a breezy cloak, stir the winds into frenzy with her sighs, send cities spinning with a swish of her golden curls. Beside her, darkness, or dread, or Midnight, shaded deep like a dream 1 almost remember, would cry crawling with hisses and screams and ambition, to blot out the sun with her night-colored hair, casting her rings to the sky to sparkle like stars. And steaming through the ether beside them, inferno or phoenix or Magma—hair like passion, the color of flickering flame, of bright, pretty poison, spitting blessings and curses to the beat of a quick-spinning pulsar—whose touch could burn and burn in ecstasy forever. And my glorious gods would not come home for dinner at night—not to cook it, not to eat it They would gulp down asteroids and comets with a dash of dark matter, sip slow from the Milky Way, floss their teeth with a cosmic string, spend their mornings trying on nebulae for size, for functionality, swishing their swirling gasses, their forming stars from side to side as they stride over extra-solar objects, lose themselves in an event horizon for the night, their eyes shining with wild excitement before they close for millennial sleep. They could be lanky or plump, titan-height or quark-size, their skin could be shiny or pocked by comet-strikes, they could love men or women or no one forever and ever, and they would still be Loveland |40 beautiful, and they would still be strong, and they would still be gods or demigods or just a story we tell our children to get them to sleep or finish their homework on time or keep the needles out of their arms. We would tell our children that story—that their gods are not gone, only resting while we scream their names in the breeze. And tomorrow. Dawn, and Midnight, and Magma return to fling their rings and hisses and screams, to burn with a kiss from their star-sparkled lips, and ride their black-backed dragons through our dying, decrepit sun amen. Loveland |41 Girls' night out No wonder they love it when we scream or run with our hair blowing like laurel leaves in the fall. Ask her how she felt when he spotted her in that field. Ask her if she knew her flight made her even more lovely, that pursuit was ever5d:hing, and no really did mean yes. In the dark of a bar they spit curses at her because she tells them two shots do not equal sex: You bitch, you whore. You think you 're too good for me. I didn 't until just now, she says, raking back her curls, tugging her collar up, pressing lipstick back into her lips like it's a crime to be beautiful, like she owes them something for her face, her skin, her still-swelling breasts. She owes them that drunken fuck, her arms pressed up like willowy white branches against the rum-spattered wall between the bathroom and the dance floor sweating out free drinks to the beat of some thumping house music. She owes them their bragging rights, the attention they think they deserve. Even turning away is a slap in the face, calling it a night is a cop-out, cunt. But don't worry. Biff, Trent, or whatever name you whispered over that free drink you shoved in her face. Tonight you rage at her no that means no, but soon her curls will whiten and fray, lay limp like winter twigs, her joints slowly knot and curl, her breasts droop like wilting fruit, that supple skin will wrinkle and crease like the bark of a leafless tree. Loveland |42 Loveland |43 But she's not answering the phone I can't smell her perfume anymore, but her hope chest lies open on the floor, half full of negative pregnancy tests and college credits, a tarnished wedding band, a half-finished manuscript. An untaken vacation spills over the corners so there is no way to close that lid again, no way to contain her ruined ambition, no way to reclaim the childhood innocence of not knowing that everyone isn't an astronaut or ballerina or tamer of unicorns. If there were background music for this still-shot, it would start slow and rise, rise again to a crescendo like Mozart's "Lacrimosa" to end in one symphonic amen. Loveland |44 Iphigenia leaves home My babies would hate me if they knew I was nothing more than a broken-winged angel, a Clytemnestra—a lover, a fighter, a bitch. 1 wrap my ruined web around them, pull them in too tight, drown them in my own misgivings, my own stifling dread. If I loved you more or loved you less, I'd let go before you know I'm not more than human, not more than the skin that coats me like a slowly sagging shroud, not more than a brain receding in microscopic spurts, synapses sputtering into nothing, burning out on regret. You smile as you stand by the open door and 1 smile back with a love that hides the knot in my gut, that hides twenty-one years of half-taken breaths, that hides the nightmares of your broken body, of your broken hopes, my fists clenched at my sides to fight the greedy beasts waiting for you when you close that door. And silently 1 hope you'll take the mace from your purse and hold it out like a warrior's sword, screaming back, Kraken, back as you step from the door to your Jeep on the street, from my arms with your suitcases packed, come back, Iphigenia, come back. Loveland |45 "Only love me dearly" This battle-mad bitch storms on goddess-style, her words flinging out like many arms, like spatters of blood, like a third eye of fire in her wrath-wrinkled forehead. Forgive her fearful appearance, forgive her flashing white teeth. She can't keep her bloody tongue silent, can't choke back her mother-rage, her grief at your wounded innocence, her fear of the shame that will follow you like wolves follow a wounded deer. You look away from her sometimes. Walk away from her with your head down, but she's that shadow at your back, her hands open, her arms open, her feet planted, only a ghost until you turn, until you forgive her anger, forgive the curses that spray from her lips like wine. Forgive her hummingbird heart. Loveland |46 Walking Across the Street If I wait on the bank, coin clenched in my fist, breathe to the beat of a slowing drum or a four-part hallelujah, lounge back on the crisping grass, on a blanket with no picnic scattered around me, waiting silently for you to come back, will you wave at me from across the dark water, will you smile one last time on your way to the Elysian fields, will 1 clench this coin in my fist by my side or try to bribe that hooded guide to row you back to the bank where you stood in a line of dearly departed, waiting to see if the thing they believed in was true or a story told by their mothers, a story they recited when they sent someone else over the river—believed it because not believing meant something worse? Or will 1 let the coin drop to the trampled grass and reach through the mists of the river to touch you again, read your face like a blind woman would, drag my fingers over your stiffening lips for goodbye in lieu of a kiss, in lieu of flowers, in lieu of watching you hold your growing son's hand? And when you're finally gone, will 1 catch sight of you through my open window, in my shrouded mirror, over my shoulder as 1 walk across the street from the places you've never been? Loveland |47 Hagborn There is always that one old woman in her bathrobe and slippers, shuffling down the sidewalk, down the aisles of the grocery store, sitting on her steps chewing grass, saliva dried in the corners of her mouth, her hair white and wild like unblown dandelions, her fingers, the bones she casts to taste our fates—tongue flicking at probability like a frog in the marsh. Her wrinkles, the art you don't understand, crosshatches of fear, pinpoints of understanding, daubs of failure. What you call decay, I call wisdom, and I'm calling out that rancid string of flesh from her nostril, pulling at it until I see truth older than truth. I see me in her left eye, now and then forever. I see me in her right eye from the ending back. That bit of rot is the rot I'll see in the mirror tomorrow. The rot that I scrub at until it bleeds—that I pick at until it bleeds— until it's the part of me I don't want gone, the part that remembers the moment to be woman, to be mother, to give the bits of me to him, to her, to them. The part of me that holds something back for myself. She smiles at me, her brown tooth tottering in her gaping mouth, wider and wider until she swallows me, pats me into her stomach, and gives birth to me in a white, sloppy mess. I stretch, I scream, I open my eyes, I smile, kick my shell apart and rise like a Dido who stepped back from the flames, like a Sybil who opened the latch on her hanging cage, like fire, like hope from an opened box. Loveland |48 Ley Lines This is the intersection of young and old, of feeling thirsty and picking up that glass, spooning the scum off the top, sniffing it, taking a tentative sip before you shoot it like cheap vodka or cough medicine or your grandmother's weird poultice made of herbs and spit. This is the shamanistic moment when you go from not-knowing, to knowing, to doing the thing you never thought you'd be brave enough to do—that step onto an invisible bridge, that squaring off in front of your Grendel with no weapons in your hands, that sharp inhale before the plunge. You can't curl up on that bed forever, you can't keep the closet door closed. This is your bare toe on the hardwood floor. This is your door swinging out into the night air. This is your first step into the open field, your first dive off the cliff. This is your Mount Sinai. This is your breathy incantation in a world without magic. A divorce. A death. An open eye. A convergence of things, good or bad, that create an unstoppable force—our ley lines, our Shivas, our destructions before creations. Our dwarves of ignorance pressed down. Our broken hearts, our monsters, our fears overcome. This is Apollo outrun. Loveland |49 With a Look of Dreadful Love I became Eve the day I said I do and promised to be obedient to my husband—the day I planted my first kitchen garden with tomatoes and peppers and two kinds of onions. 1 became Eve over and over again with each new birth, each new child tearing his or her way into the world, screaming at the brightness and unmuffled noise, then settling in to blink through the Vitamin E the nurses slathered onto his or her eyes. 1 spent all my time taking care of them, thinking about them, worrying for their safeties, planning ways to fix them if they got broken, to save them if they needed saving. As they grew older, I learned not to worry as much about the broken eggs or play-stained clothes, and more about trips to the park, or trying out a new cuisine that the youngest wouldn't dump out while I wasn't looking. 1 took care of my own children and other people's children too. 1 was all-mother, having bitten the apple, but not wise enough yet to shed my fig leaf and run naked from the garden into the untamed wilds with my giggling children in tow. I became Sarakka the day I clipped the cord binding the baby girl to Stephanie, her sixteen-year-old mother. 1 was flattered by the not-quite-invitation—the shrug after Does Grandma want to cut the cord? I didn't correct them, didn't tell them 1 wasn't old enough to be Stephanie's mother, because I had always been on the other end of the cord-cutting, and didn't want to jeopardize the opportunity. But the cord was tougher than 1 had imagined and no one told me to close my mouth. 1 was mid-celebratory amaaaaazing when drops of warm cord blood spattered my neck and face. My open mouth. 1 wiped my face seven times seventy times and took Stephanie and her newborn daughter home from the hospital with Loveland |50 me. I bought baby blankets and diapers. I took care of them until they didn't need me anymore. I became Saravsati in August of 2002 when I started college at the age of thirty-one. I drove to campus the Saturday before the semester started, walking to both of my classrooms, wondering if my professors would shake their heads when I walked in—if the fresh-out-of-high-school freshmen would roll their eyes at how irrelevant my education was. Sure, 1 could tell you how much Tylenol to give a feverish baby, what it felt like to keep nursing after your nipples cracked and bled, how long you could go without sleep before you started hallucinating, but I didn't know the mathematical order of operations or how many paragraphs were actually in a five-paragraph essay. Five minutes into my first class, I sat owl-eyed, unwise, unconfident, and certain I didn't belong there. Frumpmother. Obsolete. These feelings were cemented when the adjunct instructor wrote ambiguous across the top of my first response paper in blue pen because she didn't believe red marks helped anyone. "Ambiguous," I said. "I think I know what that means, but I'm not sure." I became Hel in May 2003 when I opened my front door to a police officer on my porch, holding my nephew's hand. "Do you know what's happening?" he asked. I shook my head. The officer guided my nephew inside before he told me that my sister's husband had died in his sleep and the paramedics were only pretending to try to resuscitate him so she didn't lose it completely. I kept Sam distracted with a chess game while the paramedics took his father's body away. "My pond takes your bishop," Sam said. Loveland |51 Not again, I said with a stretched-out smile. Frownsmile. Crysmile. I didn't correct him, not this time, because his barely-begun life had just changed forever and he didn't know it yet. Later, 1 went to my sister's house and helped scrub out the fluids her husband expelled after he died on their mattress. 1 did it with my eyes closed. My body did it with my mind somewhere else. My hands kept holding the brush. My arms kept scrubbing the surface, but I could never get all the stuff out that was hidden underneath. 1 became Mania five months later, when my little brother died in his sleep. Screaming Mania in denial, silent Mania with regret. It was my first semester taking a full course load, and suddenly my philosophy, chemistry, and astronomy classes seemed particularly painful, since Bill and I read... used to read the works of philosophers and discuss them while my children attended chess club at the library on Wednesday nights. And chemistry—well, he was a body already decomposing—an enzymatic breakdown of cells, gas-causing bacteria, liquefaction and disintegration. During my astronomy class, while the other students were snoozing in the darkened planetarium, 1 was imagining Bill's decaying cells breaking down and effervescing into starstuff. Dark matter. My brother the nebula. Nebula Bill. The Bill's-Eye Nebula. We never got to discuss Plato. I became Maedb a year later as 1 got divorced for the second time. We promised to be civil for the sake of the children, but hit a few rocky patches along the way—dividing our things between us, talljnng who ended up with the most—furniture minus debt, ego minus regret, equal or not equal to the admiration of our children, finding moments of respect for each other, devolving into moments of ugly animalistic disgust. Pawing at the dust with our hooves, doling out friends like Christmas cookies on pretty plastic plates. Loveland |52 So I became Amphictyonis. I sampled various spirits alone in my shitty duplex on the nights my children stayed with their father—toasting that empty chair, cheers to the damn annoying cat, rchaim to the fucking unwashed dishes. 1 staggered from room to empty room, discovering with each sip that I hated gin, but loved blood-red wines— Merlots, Cabernets, Pinot Noirs. 1 loved the deep, full flavors, I loved the fruity bite. 1 relished the burn that consumed my new emptiness in warm red fire *with a hint of black cherry and oak. I became Skeleton Woman for almost a year, caught in the churning tow, dragged along in the wake behind the English teacher and the nature-lover, coming back to life as I was tugged to the surface, but never quite refleshing myself, never putting my hands on both sides of their hearts, never gulping down their tears to make myself whole. I became Kali as 1 struggled to find my stride as a single mother, unable to contain and control my many arms pinwheeling out many punishments, many hugs in response to many punishments, biting back my bitter retorts, my blood-stained tongue so silent, and never silent enough. Angry Kali. Loving Kali. I stomped my feet to break the world. I became Aphrodite when I met a guitarist after a concert, who handed me a golden apple and asked me to be careful with him. I was careful with him in my own recently-divorced, newly-unreligioned way. We carefully walked the streets of Hollywood, of Salt Lake City, of Santa Monica, of Ogden, hand in hand with me carefully in awe of my newfound happiness. Hand in hand at restaurants. Hand in hand in shopping malls. After a while, he decided I was too careful with him and he let go of my hand. Unbitten apple, molding golden core. Loveland |53 I became Saga when I received my degree despite the deaths and divorce, despite the fact that most of my friends and family members thought I would take a couple of classes then drop out because I didn't have the drive or stamina it took to see something that hard through to completion. Despite the challenges of being a single mother, of walking to the store, a mother duck with her ducklings strung out beside and behind her, I saw my degree through to completion. The price was six years, two student loans, and one ulcer. A husband. I became Lam Lha when I traveled to Europe with a woman I barely knew, in an Emersonian attempt to complete my education. I tiptoed across the ocean-slick Giant's Causeway, gaped in awe at La Sagrada Familia, sunned on my first topless beach with my top on. Lounged on the steps of the Duomo staring at the golden baptistery doors. I ate fish and chips out of newspaper in London, a vegemite sandwich in Derry. I'll never forget the lined and weathered face of Jerry, our IRA tour guide—his quiet solemnity as he prefaced the tour. "I can't promise to tell you the truth about what happened," he said. "But I can promise to tell you my truth the way I remember it. I was there." Jerry from Derry. Londonderry. Free Derry. I became Isis when my youngest came out in junior high school and started falling to pieces because his classmates couldn't accept that he was gay. The boys who liked girls couldn't accept that he was gay. The girl who thought she loved him couldn't accept that he was gay. I gathered his broken parts and pressed them together—his broken heart against my broken heart his broken will, his broken faith when he realized most of his relatives Loveland |54 beli6ved he would go to hell for who he loved. For how he loved. For not wanting sex the Biblical way. The gathering and reassembling took years and sometimes felt as hopeless as dl§§iiig in the sand while the waves rolled over us—every time 1 reattached a broken piece of him, someone else tore one off with brutal, bigoted carelessness. It sometimes felt as frightening as bobbing on a raft in a storm on the ocean. Watching him float away in the emergency room at 2 a.m., both of us pulled apart in the undertow, me desperately scrambling to pull him back. Trying to reach him through his unseeing eyes. I became Inanna when 1 berated my boyfriend for not showing me enough affection for not nuzzling me in public the way the others had, not putting his hands on both sides of my face and shouting out how lucky he was to have met me, for not writing poems of adoration, for not buying me flowers. I second-guessed his silence and mistook it for apathy. When he asked me where the other ones were who had said/orever, I shook my head. "I'm here," he said. "Tm the one who stays." I became Demeter in 2010, the night my daughter snuck away at 2 a.m., leaving nothing behind but two footprints in the dying garden beneath her window. My heart grew colder as she stayed with a friend for the last week of school, frigid when she took a plane to Florida to stay with her birth mom. I wrapped my wilting arms around my youngest son who couldn't understand why she had gone without so much as a goodbye. 1 became White Tara in fits and starts as I slowly realized 1 didn't need someone else to tell me I was beautiful to like the way I looked—or tell me 1 was smart to feel competent at school or my workplace. I didn't need to win a free BEST MOM mother's day cruise warrior. are or Loveland |55 sponsored by a radio station to know my children loved me. I didn't need anyone else to tell me it was OK to be happy or proud of what I had done. That I was a good person. A I figured out on my own that words are just words and have no meaning unless they backed by action—by the people who mean the most to me. People like my children, who still love me no matter how many times I fell when I was lurching from Mania to Maedb Aphrodite to Kali. Like the unwavering love and approval of my father even though I live my life perpendicular to his beliefs. With all my aspects wrapped around me like coats, like robes, or hung in the closet for another season, tucked away in the back of a drawer, still waiting to be mended or cleaned from the last fiasco, strewn on the floor so I can slip into them in the morning, billow them around me when I get home from work, or on a lazy Saturday according to my mood or need—I stretch, I stumble, I glide, I fall. I wrap my wings, my arms, my halos around me like shawls. I use them like tissues to wipe my tears, to tie back my greying hair, or sketch out my plans for the next five years, list the pros and cons of things I am considering. I am a work in progress, a revised draft of my earlier self—always becoming, descending, rising again, waxing and waning, and riding the currents—calf muscles tight, tiptoe, reaching up in anticipation.