TRINI ROGANDO —
ZAGREUS FROM HADES DIES THIRTY-THREE TIMES
on your screen before he sees the sun. As
you know, brother: such is the process of
godhood. Take and take and try again. The
years unwind to taunt
men, each month a failed epitaph, a blank
wrinkle in the cut of legacy—so we find salves in
games, girls, gardens of grudges. See: Magdalene,
call her Megaera. Say she is an ending, a success story,
a strength. Punctuate her with the names that
real girls don’t seem to deserve. You take and take and try
but brother, they’ll defy death: all legends are
just sound and light. You and I are so different
from divinity. Compare: Jesus lived thirty-three years before
hollowing gold. Denizens of our family reach autumn,
chiseled cataracts constellating our eyes, before
we choke into dark. Our granddad diffused to a victim,
you know. He left and we never loved all of him back.
On the grave we carved nothing but his name;
grudges, blank in stone. Maybe obsolescence is why you
still pray. Maybe stillness is why you find escape in games,
in Hades, in corded weavings of control. There the
days and nights mingle—darkness groped to swallow sight;
a violation of sense. Do you recognize this otherhood
in me? The absence of communion: atheism,
starved, skull-hard siege? Say beauty, if nothing else.
Say it is new if you do not know. I want to be new.
How to see a god when you cannot see yourself.
This is what Zagreus takes from you players; themselves
the puppeteers, fingers pulling apart shades and shades of
blood like pork. Or is it wine. Our gold silences
nest samely, round in mouth. The passing of syllable is
barely changed. I want to change. Think, brother: how
at church camp they take away
our phones so we forget everything, even time. Maybe God wants the
lack of screenlight to scrub out our blind bones, reform
aging ribcages to his pleasure. I want to forget.
I don’t get thirty-three chances. When I take and
take and try to leave—I hope you understand. You
and I, we’re bound by fathers, you see. Our
pantheon men joysticking from heaven and earth and
hell. I’m sorry but I want to escape: to watch the
glisten of blood slick and shrink, a pariah called
a paragon—my hand on doorknobbed resurrection,
hoping for a new, softened, throb.
Trini Rogando is a junior from Virginia. You can find her poems in Perhappened Magazine, the Lumiere Review, Wrongdoing Mag, and elsewhere. She wants to remind everyone to not take life too seriously; no one ever gets out alive. Her twitter is @triniwashere.