Tyrannus, by Lee Sharkey

Tyrannus, by Leonard Baskin (USA) 1982. © Leonard Baskin Art Trust. Courtesy of Leonard Baskin Art Trust.

​Tyrannus

Insistent blank colossal male afflatus, inexorable graphic engine in dire semblance to ourselves. Sniggling the threads of our being. I brood him out of an old black book, densities of white and blackness speaking to the eyes. As he repels me so he compels me, smelling like ink and reading like triumph, the blind bulk of him, the microcephalic terror. The forest of his vacant pride. I cover my head and am visited by angels slathered in oil and ash. I Am Who I Am, his circumscribe, bent over him, scoring code into every crossing, rendering his primate hand as an overhang of branches. I nest a blackbird in his thigh. Turn your head, look closely—his tiny scrotum becomes an egg.

Lee Sharkey

Lee Sharkey completed I Will Not Name It Except to Say (Tupelo, 2021) in the final weeks before she died in Portland, Maine in October 2020. Her earlier books of poems include Walking Backwards (Tupelo, 2016), Calendars of Fire (Tupelo, 2013), and five earlier volumes, as well as a number of chapbooks. Her awards include the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Translation Prize and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship in the Literary Arts. She served for fifteen years as co-editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal.