Prose

The First Dakini understood Cavafy’s need to summon the horses of Achilles with their amber eyes gazing down at a wilting Patroklus. Ovid tried to do the same, exhorting Raymon Elozua to channel them first through a digital print, then with the same success he had with terracotta and steel. But the Tarpan horses refuse to resurrect, happy in their freer wildness, a scale without breaking-point limits, beyond bitter ends. Theirs is a riot of courage reds, keepsakes, and softly, a quiet fragility. The First Dakini understood the likely effects, the net motifs, the singular vividness. The First Dakini empathised, and so broke the vajra fetters, the leg irons no longer chafing purpling ankles.     


* This piece first appeared in PANK, a literary journal out of Michigan.