Twelve of us dropped our pale feet against the ground
on your orders thinking between the lines of a silk edged
rope that perhaps despite your stories of heroism and
rebirth that even the gods cannot change the fate pill bottle
prescribed to them so why had we hoped to medicate ours
into submission exchanging flattery and lips for beggars’
bone and blood to be taken as the kind of payment men
accept split down the middle so that words and actions all
beget their double meanings and detrimental side effects
are valued in themselves as value and its prices imprint
themselves on our eyelids with the same cursed coin you
wrested from us leaving our white throats blue with bruises
ransom to a riverboat over hate you plan carefully your
tariffs and exchange rates twelve lives for honors hardly
a price to pay—
after all, the poets say we struggled for a little, not very long.*
*From Homer's Odyssey
Jordan Davidson is a student of Humanities and Physics at Yale University with aspirations of genetically engineering large, centipede-like rabbits to be used for world domination. Just kidding. Or is she? Her work has previously been published by Zombies Need Brains, Gingerbread House, and CORTEX Collective, among others, and is upcoming in Ionosphere and Corvid Queen.