He Had a Terrible Childhood

my mother tells me, and proceeds

to elaborate at gruesome length.

But don’t all gods and heroes get off

to a rocky start? Young Theseus thrashed

in his fish shack, Zeus sent abroad to avoid

being lunch for his dad. I am twelve

and obsessed with Greek myths.

I won’t repeat the gory details

of my mother’s story here, but the gist

is, faced with the madness of monsters who

were his parents, the god in our basement

made his mind a labyrinth

and retreated inside it, where he invented

everything but the way out. I felt it

the first time I met him, shying away from him

as a horse does a broken bridge.

Though in time I learned to cross it—home

was on the other side: my mother, shelter, bed.

Do you think I shouldn’t have married him?

she asked me once. It must have been

my senior year of high school. I kept silent.

Like Cassandra I had a knack for sight

yet there was nothing I could have said.