Chryse: Thoughts about gold.

chryselephantine: meaning
overlaid in ivory and gold–
chryse: a wealthy greek courtesan, whose maids bathed her
from clay pots with great sponges and smearings
of honey; who was bangled with gold and who brought, daily
gifts of perfume to the goddess aphrodite.
chrysalis: a thing unformed
chrysolepic: some creature, lets say a dragon, or fish, golden-scaled.
crisis: the turning point in a disease, which indicates
recovery or death.

this sound, “chrys”, repeated often enough, takes us to a shore, i think, and golden-scaled fish
swimming in pearly-blue water. a number of shells and eggs, harboring formless things, which
will culminate
as winged-bugs or as beautiful
women. a heart-attack
is a crisis of the heart, a death, or a healing in a flash like the cracking
of a mysterious
egg.

Mara Jebsen is a performer, poet and Senior Language Lecturer for NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her poems can be found in jubilat, earlier issues of Fogged Clarity, Boxcar Poetry Review, and Hanging Loose Press. A New York Foundation of the Arts fellow and essayist for the Arts & Literature column of 3quarksdaily, Mara has been working at the intersection of poetry and drama for 16 years, and hails from Philadelphia, and Togo, West Africa.