After Happily Ever After Wendy Taylor Carlisle

Mythmaking

They said she loved her son less
than she hated her consort. When
the boy was born they said it was an Egyptian
she touched, a magus,
peddling seduction and cheap amulets.
Olympia said different.
The God Olympia knew, coiled around her,
brown, sinewy, he entered.
She bore divinity, to spite the palace
scolds and shaped a fiction to name her son
immortal like his father-snake.
Philip didn’t care, dallying in the barracks,
currying his horse in the stable, casting knucklebones
in the alley. When he had done with her, he slid away.

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October 2003 2River