Orpheus returns
from the Hades Carnival
alone and empty-handed,
only to spend another life cycle
below ground seeking an entry
to the underworld and for his beloved’s
satyr-harried specter drifting always
beyond his reach.

He wanders, his acoustic alive
in his hands; he strums and tongues
the type of love that would raise the dead,
were their ears not stoppered
by the droning of their own regrets.

Orpheus would die if he could
in this unending sepulcher.
He floats on his back in the watery ether
of the Acheron, alongside bouquets
of Persephonean black orchids
waiting for destiny’s lottery to select
him again for some new light.

Again, he endures a womb,
a soaked and traumatic birth,
suckling and swaddled at the brown,
freckled breast of a woman
who has never heard of Hades.

Orpheus is reborn and reborn
and reborn, until the name Eurydice
becomes merely another lyric in his song.

Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow Bianca Spriggs is a freelance instructor of composition, literature, and creative writing. She holds degrees fromTransylvania University and the University of Wisconsin. She is a Kentucky Humanities Council Lecturer and the creator and programmer of the Wild Women of Poetry Slam (formerly the Gypsy Poetry Slam) featured annually at theKentucky Women Writers Conference. Heralded as “the new standard bearer for the Affrilachian Poets” by founding member Frank X Walker, Bianca is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and her work may also be found in the anthologies New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings and America! What’s My Name? and the journals Union Station Magazine, Appalachian Heritage Magazine, and others.

I’m either a werewolf or I’m crazy, but I’m not boring
– Anonymous Graffiti, Ohio University

Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow Bianca Spriggs is a freelance instructor of composition, literature, and creative writing. She holds degrees fromTransylvania University and the University of Wisconsin. She is a Kentucky Humanities Council Lecturer and the creator and programmer of the Wild Women of Poetry Slam (formerly the Gypsy Poetry Slam) featured annually at theKentucky Women Writers Conference. Heralded as “the new standard bearer for the Affrilachian Poets” by founding member Frank X Walker, Bianca is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and her work may also be found in the anthologies New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings and America! What’s My Name? and the journals Union Station Magazine, Appalachian Heritage Magazine, and others.

I imagine the dying wasp is actually pirouetting along the rim
of her next life, and not this step. For days now, I have watched
her charge every window pane on the top floor, only to fall here.
And because she is a wasp and I was afraid of her sting,
I let her alone, hoping someone else might upturn a palm
or scrap of paper to usher her back into light and life.
I should not be surprised. This is a place where critters come to expire.
Last year, a moonrat upped and died in our kitchen wall.
And later, a bat found its way into the mousetrap alongside
the same wall. Someone threw its petrified body out
with the week’s garbage. I step over the wasp, not quite willing
to step on her because her life is yet propelled, however like
an automaton’s, by breath and whatever still throbs beneath
her exoskeleton. Does she curse me as my sole’s shadow falls
across her brink? Does she wish upon me bad karma for not sending
her sooner into nextlife? Was she the moonrat all along, and later
the bat, destined to repeat birth and death within my walls?
Perhaps she will continue to be sent back, next as something
more repellant, something that spits or secretes, until I cast
my bleeding, lily-livered heart behind an ironclad veil.
Then we will no longer circle one another for the duration
of her afterlives. If I could crush her just this once,
if she could endure just this death, then perhaps whatever debt
she owes the universe is rendered moot, and she is reborn
as a surprise lily in some lovely field that no human,
with all our clumsy ineptitudes and moral misgivings, can reach.
Maybe when I see her tomorrow, her brass bullet of a body
roiling along the step, I will resolve that no living thing
should suffer this way. I will step on her. I will end her life.
And maybe nothing happens. Then she and I will both know
she was never born to become anything but a dead wasp.

More from How Swallowtails Become Dragons and Bianca Spriggs:

• “How Swallowtails Become Dragonflies” (click here for video)
• “Practice Round”
• “After Loving a Pretty Man”
• An Interview with Bianca Spriggs (Part 1) (Part 2)
• Writing Challenge: “Below the Surface”

Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow Bianca Spriggs is a freelance instructor of composition, literature, and creative writing. She holds degrees from Transylvania University and the University of Wisconsin. She is aKentucky Humanities Council Lecturer and the creator and programmer of theWild Women of Poetry Slam (formerly the Gypsy Poetry Slam) featured annually at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Heralded as “the new standard bearer for the Affrilachian Poets” by founding member Frank X Walker, Bianca is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and her work may also be found in the anthologies New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings and America! What’s My Name? and the journals Union Station Magazine, Appalachian Heritage Magazine, and others.

 Having opened to their fullest, they opened further
– Carl Phillips, Distortion

Too early, we grow teeth.

Too early, we are not content,
not knowing the longer
we remain one way – steeping –
the more brilliant we become.

And so harvest comes early.

We cannot help that the resin
running through us is so hot
and so sweet it overwhelms,
changing us.

We cannot help the one day
we desire to open another’s flesh –
to know it better – and our own.

Here in a world of blood
(not so far below some hazed,
veined sky we do not remember
the sun), we wish to breathe fire.

Too early, though we do not know it
yet by name, we wish for alchemy:

water to blood
.             blood to gold
.                           gold to flesh
.                                       flesh to wings

.             wings to wind.

–Bianca Spriggs,
How Swallowtails Become Dragons
Accents Publishing

More from How Swallowtails Become Dragons and Bianca Spriggs:

• “Practice Round”
• “After Loving a Pretty Man”
• An Interview with Bianca Spriggs (Part 1) (Part 2)
• Writing Challenge: “Below the Surface”
• Bianca Spriggs on Accents Radio (8/16/13)

Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow Bianca Spriggs is a freelance instructor of composition, literature, and creative writing. She holds degrees from Transylvania University and the University of Wisconsin. She is a Kentucky Humanities Council Lecturer and the creator and programmer of the Wild Women of Poetry Slam (formerly the Gypsy Poetry Slam) featured annually at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference. Heralded as “the new standard bearer for the Affrilachian Poets” by founding member Frank X Walker, Bianca is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and her work may also be found in the anthologies New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings and America! What’s My Name? and the journals Union Station Magazine, Appalachian Heritage Magazine, and others.