Consequence
The magpies have shit on
the frieze of the ancient temple.
By Western standards, that makes them king.
At colossal scale, the lunging
naked warrior, cock and nuts
heavy as a giraffe’s—
I’m reprimanded for taking a photo.
Most of the muscled boys,
their white torsos and cold loins,
are castrated. Everyone resents
how basic power is. My father
would walk around the house naked
smelling of Elsha, while I was too shy
not to be fully clothed. The Greeks did it to
the Sabellians, the Persians to the Greeks,
then the Romans did the same—
swung the blunt hammers into the center
of procreation, of those they hadn’t
already claimed. It’s true
there are so few stories,
and we only get a new one
when we’ve learned from the old.
Look at all the royalty, their faces still
stamped into gold. Father
had one unhealable wound, all ichor
and pus, he’d lick and lick
and from there was born every consequence.
Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and five chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. He has edited two anthologies, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, which received a Midwest Book Award, and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry. For more information, visit christophernelson.info.
