Poetry: self-portrait as icarus in the labyrinth by Ashleigh Xindan Kennedy
In Ashleigh Xindan Kennedy’s poem, the reader is trapped between past and present, longing and loss, put into the perspective of both Icarus and the Minotaur. The narrator explores what it is to be human or maybe not human at all, speaking of wings and the sea and “an itch for some blue,” all while the wax continues to melt.
self-portrait as icarus in the labyrinth
with a line from Natalie Diaz
some nights i swallow the cry
of the beast beside me,
cup his horns into my
hands. his whines slicing
through the walls, my throat,
dark notes dripping
from his chin. his face: velveteen
and bleeding, snout speckled
with snot. his hands: human
and divine, cradling the arc
between my wings. some nights
i pretend he’s mine. we’re not
so different as minos
would have me think. half
man, all hoof. what myth
makes him animal, while my
name flutters in your mouth? he
was born cursed, or so athens
echoes in the streets, his mother queen
of whores, his father a beautiful
brute, and lo, out came
a monster, hurled soon beneath
the city. meanwhile, i was sewn
into air, tight gasp
of needles laced into
my spine, my father’s threads
twining through my veins. i know
i was made a mutant, and yet i can’t
remember being human now. these wings,
if not the gods’, still hurtle me toward
eternity, an itch for some blue ache
of air, the city splayed beneath me
like a lover, before a jailbird’s
hover brings me to my knees. some
nights, i dream of the sea: asterion
beside me, the two of us spilling down
before the sun, wax washed
from my shoulder blades, pinions
unpinned from steel
and stitches, plumes unfurling
with a sigh. i step
into the aftermath, hooves
in hand, and there, strewn
before us: the sky, stripped
for invention.
Ashleigh Xindan Kennedy
Ashleigh Xindan Kennedy is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi, where she is a John and Renée Grisham Fellow and a reader for the Yalobusha Review. She has previously been published by the Sigma Tau Delta Review and Literary Orphans, and has twice received the Laura A. Rice Poetry Prize. She hails from Central Pennsylvania and Central China.
