I am running without motion

Despite having very little time to write these days, I am pleased to report that I have just sold two poems: "Orpheus at the Bimah" to lesser_celery for Not One of Us, and "Flint and Roses" to time_shark for Mythic Delirium. Now if only that weren't my entire creative output for the months of March and April right there.

The first of these is dedicated to Michael Zoosman on the second of Nisan, and the title more or less sums it up. The second is based on some—if not all, because there's an incredible wealth—of the folklore about the White Sparkstriker, saqi k'oxol, a minor Mayan god with whom I've been in love for years.

. . . the sun himself rises. On just this one occasion he appears as an entire person, so hot he dries out the face of the earth. His heat turns Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz to stone, along with such pumas, jaguars, and snakes as there were at the time. A diminutive god named White Sparkstriker escapes petrifaction by going into the shade of the trees, becoming the keeper of the stone animals. He remains to this day as a gamekeeper, with volcanic concretions, fulgurites, and meteorites that resemble animals in his personal care. He may be encountered in forest and caves, or on dark nights and in dreams: he appears in contemporary masked dramas dressed entirely in red, the color of dawn . . . This is the Sparkstriker in his role as gamekeeper; today the dangerous animals only attack people who have failed in their ritual duties. According to Lucas Pacheco, a daykeeper from a town near Santa Cruz del Quiché, the corral where the Sparkstriker keeps his animals is located deep within a branch of a cave beneath the ruins of Rotten Cane; in that context they take the form of small stones. The fortunate may be allowed to take some of these: the unfortunate fall into a great, wide mouth.
—Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life

Those are the aspects of saqi k'oxol that turned up in my poem. But despite the male pronoun used here, which I preserved in "Flint and Roses," the White Sparkstriker is in fact ambiguous in gender: s/he carries lightning in the shape of a stone axe and wears only one shoe; the other was lost when the k'oxol fled the first sunrise (and somewhere out there in the Central American landscape, to this day, is a petrified shoe). The Sparkstriker may also leave money for those whom s/he likes, usually by taking off and throwing away this remaining shoe. In the dance-drama called Saqi K'oxol in Quiché and La Conquista in Spanish, s/he figures as the daykeeper (or the daykeeper's dwarf assistant) who foretells the sixteenth-century Spanish Conquest of Yucatán and again escapes into the forests, this time to preserve indigenous customs against Christianity. And there's at least one fanfiction out there on the internet that stars the White Sparkstriker as a demon, but I'll still take Dennis Tedlock's word over Random Fanfic any day.

In any case, I don't think this character has been sufficiently exorcized from my head: I'm waiting to see in what other stories s/he will turn up now.

And I don't write godslash, but I'm still left with the lingering and perhaps ill-fated impression that the White Sparkstriker and Inari, the shape-changing, androgynous, Japanese fox-god of rice, really should know one another . . .