Colleen Harris
It Begins This Way
I
It begins this way: cousin
and cousin, Titan and Olympian.
Zeus—who also goes by Richard—
is a plunderer, a capturer of women,
a jungle of lust as eagle, bull, ant, swan,
tangled in his own tawdry desires,
needing and feeding on beauty, seeding
himself. Prometheus—who is also Chad—
by crafty counsel gives men fire to keep warm,
gives men clouds to keep warned
of the god-king’s impending rain,
convinces Zeus-Richard to take
the greasy dross of bones and fat
and forms men’s taste for the good meat,
gives them Clymene’s crockpot recipes
for pot roast and beef stifado.
The god who comes upon women
as a cloud, as a shower of gold coins,
as the whispered pledge of a new Brahmin satchel,
as the one who makes the strippers wince
because he squeezes too hard
and follows them out to the dimly lit lot
decides it should be a woman to level his cousin.
Pandora—who is always Pandora—becomes.
The ingredients for hell are hot hate,
a man, a man, and a girl new-born of earth.
II
After a new girl has opened all the gifts,
the party winds down to lyres strumming
Semisonic’s Closing Time,
half-drunk gods take Tupperware
of ambrosia home, except Dionysus—
Dio takes the leftover wine, only the reds.
The streamers droop. One gift remains.
A girl grows bored. A girl grows bold
and holds the forbidden jar in her hands.
It is heavy with content, or portent.
It could be filled with solid perfume,
or the silent regard of a parliament of owls.
Richard enjoys his frat house jokes,
it could be spring-loaded snakes.
The prize inside might be seeds stolen
from Hera’s far-west haunt, the Hespirides.
A sharp twist of bangled wrists,
and the chaos of the world boils out.
Richard laughs until he retches.
Her seat tilts and the world grows black.
She runs outside, her curled hair blows back.
III
A woman worries what lies beneath lids,
but a girl knows little of how hunger
draws the skeleton to skin’s surface
like curious koi from their pond,
how sickness churns upstream
in the marrow, how in death
the heart is not a heart
but a panicked rabbit leaping
into the teeth of frenzied hounds.
The girl has blood on her hands
even as she snaps the jar closed.
Washing the clotting red from her fingers:
girl becomes woman.
The music changes—war is the ring
of steel on steel, old age is a thready piccolo,
melody half-lost in the wind.
Honey, open the jar again,
re-gift it to yourself. Here, hope:
sedate and slow to kindle to full speed,
sleeping on its paws at the bottom.
It is a needful pet that takes tending.
Hold it to your cheek, hum your Yaya’s tune.
Teach your daughters to dance—
it will take the air in their lungs
to keep it breathing.
Leave your tears with the toys
of your girlhood.
Open the door to the mystery,
no need to wipe your feet of famine
or bow to the rest of us, women like you.
We know. Drink your fermented cup.
We all open the jar. Remember,
not every evil was inside—someone had to fill it.
Colleen S. Harris holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and works as a university library dean in Texas. Author of six full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, her most recent collections include The Discipline of Drowning (Winner of the 2025 Broken Tribe Press Poetry Book Award, forthcoming 2026), Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming 2026), The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, 2025), Toothache in the Bone (boats against the current, 2025), and The Girl and the Gifts (Bottlecap, 2025). Her poems appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, and more than 80 others. Follow her writing at https://colleensharris.com
