Long-haired Apollo sits with legs splayed out
in perspective slant, upright bass in hand, plucking
steady, mooded, sweat beading his pulsed temple,
beating in dissonant tones that wrap deftly over,
around his triple knotted fingers, doting on the
wide frequency which sounds through the black
as one would on the brow of a lover. He has
just lost his girl, and so he lilts, jaw cutting sound
into resounding patterns of the whole: whole;
half; quarter; eighth; sixteenth; thirty-second;
sixty-fourth; one twenty-eighth… and on he goes,
pulling time so thin and sound so distant that
there opened a new tilt in the night sky, like
a sloe eye, into which if one stepped, would find
that glass could be blown from the wind
and the birds always look black and clear
and slow against a perpetual orange. And through
this tilt a sister, Artemis, rubbing her strong jaw,
the same as his, stepped, and placed a cooling hand
on his shoulder. She sang low and calm, steady
and strong, and he heard her from the tips
of his hair to the strings of his upright bass.
As she sang, his notes grew longer, vowel
sounds beginning to reappear in place of
the staccato shrieks of false love. As she
sang, the lines of the harmony fell together
like the closing of a drawbridge at day’s end
and the two sang, in cadence old and immutable.
Anna Laura Falvey (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based poet and theater-maker. She is a graduate of Bard College with degrees in Classics & Written Arts, with a specialty in Ancient Greek tragedy and poetry, where she spent her college career blissfully hidden behind the Circulation and Reference desks at the Stevenson Library, where she worked. Anna Laura is currently serving as an ArtistYear Resident Teaching Artist and Senior Fellow, teaching Poetry in Queens, NY. Her written work is forthcoming with Querencia Press, & Bloodletter Magazine, and has appeared in Ev0ke Magazine, Club Plum, Caustic Frolic, Ouch! Collective, multiple issues of Deep Overstock, Icarus Magazine, and has been featured on the Deep Overstock podcast.