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Romulus and Remus
By Charlie Malone
Filthy with river water and vernix,
brothers bobbed away from a trembling man
of twenty-eight, for the fi rst time in his life
ignoring orders, unable to send those
plump round faces into the brown water
to meet Hades before their skin ever felt the sun.
Th eir mother, a doe-eyed virgin spoiled
and left underground to suff ocate, would never
know they had survived, and when she died
she thought of seeing them again, and so it was
willingly that she left that room where her fi ngernails
were still stuck in the walls.
But the boys lived.
Naked and squalling, they washed onto
a faraway shore where they lay, helpless and gasping,
dying as surely as if they’d needed the water
to breathe. A childless mother of a dirty
dog untouched by the gods’ unending rape
of mankind scooped them from the river bank,
licking nature’s grime from their half-god
bodies, and they grew with her, never knowing
there were other pale and hairless wolves
magus ~ 53 ~ mabus