Volume 2, Issue 1
Bedtime Mythology
Katie Cappello
She whispers the old stories as they lie in bed. The one about the seasons, the god of bread, wheat slowly withering to black stalks in an
eternal winter, dried fruit falling like stones on the roofs of good farmers whose fault it wasn’t. Panic, he whispers. Pandemonium.
She tells him about the woman who weaves the thread of his life, but he wants to hear about the baby, torn apart, then sewn into his father’s thigh
to be born a second time. Oh, little skin blemish. Oh, little deity. He wants to hear about worshippers tearing each other apart.
About fruit being ripped from the vine. About the madness of fruit just beyond the reach of his tongue, the way she hovers, pillowed and protected,
on the other side of the bed. Blankets like undulating fields, like the wrinkling of the earth’s skin at the foothill of a great mountain.
Panorama, he whispers. Pantheon, she replies.
Katie Cappello is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of Perpetual Care (Elixir Press, 2009) and A Classic Game of Murder
(dancing girl press, 2010). Her work has recently been featured in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics and as part of Ted
Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” project.