The Autobiography of Ambrosia
What is the difference between a wound and a god’s thumbprint?
Patroclus’s mouth opened to receive the nectar,
Not because he was hungry but because Achilles was violent
With his gifts. A streak of white light spilled across the collarbone.
To look at him is to look at a flashbulb going off in an empty stadium.
He has that pale, bleached-out hair of someone who lives inside a helmet.
The flash captures the moisture before it hits the floor.
Carmenta says: repetition is a form of bruising.
The liquid is thick, like boiled silver or the milk of an unholy plant.
It hangs from the lower lip in a series of semicolons.
“Tell me about the horses again,” he said,
But Achilles was already looking at the small silver ring in his nose.
A nose ring is a tiny perimeter.
A way of saying, someone has held me by the face and marked the bone.
Underneath the fringe of ash-blonde hair, one blue eye remains open,
Impartial as a fragment of Sappho found in a rubbish heap.
They don’t tell you that immortality tastes like starch.
Like unwashed linen and the sweat of men who have been running near the ships.
He tilts his head back, letting the excess drip down his throat,
A slow, heavy choreography of submission.
Eros is a verb that means to dismantle the scaffolding.
Look at his neck—the pale tendons are visible like ropes under canvas.
He is waiting for the next blow, or the next kiss,
Unable to distinguish between the two under the glare of the strobe.
“You look like a ghost,” Achilles told him.
“I am a ghost who hasn’t died yet,” Patroclus replied,
Wiping the white secretion from his chin with the back of a dirty hand.
The camera moves closer, recording the exact viscosity of desire.
In Greek, there is no word for ‘purity’ that doesn’t also mean ‘vacant.’
He stands in the dark doorway, his oversized tunic slipping off one shoulder,
Shivering not from cold but from the sheer weight of being perceived
By someone who owns thirty-four bronze chariots.
Let us discuss the physics of the spill.
The way liquid adheres to skin before gravity takes it.
It creates a map of lines down the chin, down the throat,
Into the hollow where the pulse beats like a trapped bird.
He looks directly into the lens now, or into the future.
His mouth is slightly parted, swollen, tasting of salt and godhead.
The epic ends here: not with a battle,
But with the slow, dripping silence of a boy waiting to be ruined.
