From Issue 34, a poem by Peter Kline. Enjoy!

Minotaur
by Peter Kline

You wound a ball of twine around my eyes, then pinned
the end between my fingers.

You gowned me in white tissue
like a hothouse nectarine.

The furtive door at last unbarred, I was
amazed at the garden’s suggestion

throating from vining flower-walls
in breaths that quickened with mine.

How long I lingered beneath
sun awnings and a stone-and-mortar sky,

only you know. For when I found the throne room
festooned with pelvis bones,

the twin-fingered god on whose nether lip I hung
a kiss, a crape-gartered barb,

was you—you the pursued, yours
the bull’s head draped with fragrant lash-black hair.

Peter Kline lives in San Francisco, where he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry Writing.