• Self-Portrait as Portrait of the Erinyes Pursuing Orestes

    Erin Adair-Hodges

    Spring 2022

    after Bouguereau’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 1862

    Wrath has loosened the last screw—I’m all hell
          -mouthed and fang-toothed now, not fit

    for any other job but this—the baring of my breasts,
          lowing the hound-song for your hide. Against the night

    I gleam, a skin of turned-on moons. What woman hasn’t felt
          the knife some son calls justice? I know blood,

    how it is not the end but the beginning.
          The man at the center of me is grieved, almost

    deserving of pity, but he regrets the consequence
          and not the crime. I could forgive but am not that kind

    Erin Adair-Hodges is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for Let's All Die Happy and author Every Form of Ruin, forthcoming in 2023 as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. A former academic, she is now an acquisitions editor for Lake Union Publshing.

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