After all these years & halfwayaround the world on this deckwhere I’m sitting at homein the sun & can see that somenewly hatched insect has chewed& chewed the lips of the justsprung Irises I’ve been growing,the axis tilts & sways the groundor whatever it is I amstanding on now belowmy feet, not a shipto go through like a businessof ferrets, but a busthat I’m riding againthrough a city on the other sideof the planet, crowded, socrowded in factthat I’m holding onto the strap & rockingin the absent-minded wayone does when commutingto work in stockings & dresswith all the rest that we knowbut don’t change about pay,since it’s abstract & givenin exchange, compensationfor what it is you didtoday & today by the pieceor, in my case, as tempby the hour, in someunknowable nowheredevoid of the body, only it wasmy body brought me backto the bus, my breastto be exact that some manwas cupping, reaching aroundfrom behind & it took mea minute to feel the pressurelike stiff copperarmor strapped onfor a battle & thento feel the silenceof all the other passengershushed & waiting, a soundlike a hundred little bites tickingwithin each second & stillthe fact goes bytoo fast, the man’s handon my breast & youreading these linesto the moment whenI never even slap the man,just turn & glare & pryhis fingers from my fleshas if gently looseninga bulb with a cultivatorall these years later & half-wayaround the globe, where Iam a goddess with a sticksometimes, I do a lot of smitingin the garden where I thwack& smash the beautiful backsof the grasshoppers then bury themalive with the pointof the stick into a quick holeof a grave, below topsoil, sincetheir teeth remind meof the knives kings used to wieldwhen getting to the businessof cutting out the tonguesof all the women they desiredafter—
Mythology
Feature Date
- January 15, 2025
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Mythology” from Territorial by Mira Rosenthal, © 2024. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Mira Rosenthal is an American poet and translator of Polish-language writers such as Tomasz Różycki, Małgorzata Lebda, and Krystyna Dąbrowska. Her work has been nominated twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as for the Derek Walcott Prize, the National Translation Award, and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is the author of Territorial, a Pitt Poetry Series selection, and The Local World, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Northern California Book Award, and residencies at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Her essays, poems, and translations appear regularly in such journals as Poetry, The New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Guernica, Harvard Review, New England Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. She has taught creative writing, literature, and translation at various universities, including as a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College and as a Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Cal Poly.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
University of Pittsburgh
Territorial explores the bargains that women make to stay safe from violence. Set in a landscape of looming ecological ruin, the poems bear witness to the effects of drought on the California chaparral region and delve into difficult personal terrain to reveal patterns of abuse we inflict on the earth and each other. How can we emerge from a devastated landscape into a sense of healing and repair? Using the characteristics of violence—repetition and escalation—the collection connects subjects that range from the dawn of recorded sound to the mapping of myths onto constellations, the ecosystem of a leach pond, and the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz. In tracing the ways narratives of predation imprint onto the body, memory, environment, and future generations, Territorial finds resilience in the powers of language to reshape experience.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
