Still Life of the Space between Our Apartments on a Friday Night
—for E. R. Shaffer
You keep the Minoan Snake Goddess
on a shelf in your bedroom. No one knows
what this means—least of all Arthur Evans,
who supplied a head and a left arm
to a sculpture he had found with neither
and then christened it as the fancy took him.
Generations of archaeologists have argued
over the figure, but most agree
that she is straight—that her bare breasts suggest
fertility, and that the contents of her hands, whether
snakes or ropes or something else,
have a certain phallic air about them.
It’s a thousand kilometres from Crete to Lesbos,
but I know the arc of my back when I think of you,
even at a distance—how the small of it writhes
in the memory of your sheets. And I know just
what Evans found—a woman with her blouse
open and her hand on a woman’s spine.
You keep the Minoan Snake Goddess
on a shelf in your bedroom. No one knows
what this means—least of all Arthur Evans,
who supplied a head and a left arm
to a sculpture he had found with neither
and then christened it as the fancy took him.
Generations of archaeologists have argued
over the figure, but most agree
that she is straight—that her bare breasts suggest
fertility, and that the contents of her hands, whether
snakes or ropes or something else,
have a certain phallic air about them.
It’s a thousand kilometres from Crete to Lesbos,
but I know the arc of my back when I think of you,
even at a distance—how the small of it writhes
in the memory of your sheets. And I know just
what Evans found—a woman with her blouse
open and her hand on a woman’s spine.
March 2025
Reyzl Grace is a Pushcart-nominated poet, translator, and fictionist with work featured in Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other publications. Originally from Cascadia, she now lives in Minneapolis working as a public librarian, editing poetry for Psaltery & Lyre, and distracting her girlfriend from writing a novel. You can find her on Twitter/Bluesky @reyzlgrace.
Art: Claire Tang, Pushing Up Daisies. Oil on canvas.