Axe, Altar, Neck / Alena Sullivan

I was so sure you were Helen,

all swan-forged grace             and wide white wings,

I Clytemnestra,

grey-brown,                clever,             featherless,

but the truth is this:

we sacrificed our secret selves

like daughters we could afford to lose

and Iphigenia

was just the name of a white doe all along

liquid brown eyes bright,

then dull,

the altar bloodied between us:

two fingers,                 one thorn,

no hesitation,

every breath a prayer for wind.

Andromache               was wild before she was a wife—

Circe,                          more than the Star and a spell for swine—

Ariadne,                      more than a spool for thread and secrets—

and you and I are more than sisters,

swan-born or otherwise.

No—

the truth is just this:

you and I taking turns

being the blood

and the swing                          of the axe,

childhood and sisterhood

taking turns

as Agamemnon’s

thick

neck.

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Alena Indigo Anne Sullivan was born to witches and raised in a neopagan community in the North Georgia mountains. She spent her formative years being homeschooled by her mother and traveling the world with her father's Celtic band. She holds a degree in Anthropology and an MFA from the Stonecoast MFA Program for Creative Writing with a dual concentration in Poetry and Pop Fiction. Alena is a fiction writer, poet, and visual artist who focuses on identity within narrative and the repeated cultural patterns formed by storytelling. Alena's short fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Rich Horton's Years Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, Goblin Fruit, Illumen, Urban Fantasy, Star*Line, Expanded Horizons, Luna Station Quarterly, the Wormwood Press, and elsewhere. Alena also runs Sealskin Studios on Etsy, where she offers custom embroidered spells, pagan prayer images, sigilwork, and various other magical objects as she creates them. You can find links to her work on her website at www.alenasullivan.com