My poem "Every Night and All" has been accepted by Nightmare Magazine. It is a poem of plague as much as the underworld; the title comes from the refrain of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge," which I learned as a child from the singing of Buffy Sainte-Marie. It has threaded through my work ever since. (It plays a fleeting but central role in "The Boatman's Cure.") Years later I discovered she was singing a variation on the classical arrangement by Benjamin Britten, but as much as I admire the eerie lilt of Peter Pears' famously dry white tenor, less like the living waking the dead than one ghost calling another down, the old sistrum jangle behind Sainte-Marie terrified me in childhood and no amount of strings and horns can change that even now.
2020-12-19
I spent a portion of this evening composing a Bath-style defixio—a Roman curse tablet, directed specifically against theft rather than any other offense for which the victim might desire redress—for a classicist friend who has COVID-19. In case anyone else should need a template:
deae Suli Minervae pro [ablative form of name] tibi dono vim et salutem et sensus qui perierunt. quicumque haec involavit, si vir si mulier, si puer si puella, si personatus si effrons, nisi quantocius supradicta ad aegram pertulerit, non redimat nisi sanitate et sanguine vitaque sua.
"To the goddess Sulis Minerva on behalf of [name], to you I give the strength and the soundness and the senses that were lost. Whoever has stolen them, whether man or woman, boy or girl, masked or barefaced, unless they restore the abovementioned to the afflicted as soon as possible, let them not pay off the debt except with their health and their blood and their life."
Defixiones are usually written in the first person, but I rendered this one from the perspective of an agent for the person actually suffering; it seemed more respectful and less likely to tempt fate. I have also taken the liberty of substituting, in the formula which covers the binary bases of a potential thief, the more relevant si personatus si effrons ("whether masked or barefaced") for the traditional si servus si liber ("whether slave or free"). The phrase may equally be read "whether dissembling or brazen," which expresses many of my feelings about the anti-mask contingent of this country, anyway.
deae Suli Minervae pro [ablative form of name] tibi dono vim et salutem et sensus qui perierunt. quicumque haec involavit, si vir si mulier, si puer si puella, si personatus si effrons, nisi quantocius supradicta ad aegram pertulerit, non redimat nisi sanitate et sanguine vitaque sua.
"To the goddess Sulis Minerva on behalf of [name], to you I give the strength and the soundness and the senses that were lost. Whoever has stolen them, whether man or woman, boy or girl, masked or barefaced, unless they restore the abovementioned to the afflicted as soon as possible, let them not pay off the debt except with their health and their blood and their life."
Defixiones are usually written in the first person, but I rendered this one from the perspective of an agent for the person actually suffering; it seemed more respectful and less likely to tempt fate. I have also taken the liberty of substituting, in the formula which covers the binary bases of a potential thief, the more relevant si personatus si effrons ("whether masked or barefaced") for the traditional si servus si liber ("whether slave or free"). The phrase may equally be read "whether dissembling or brazen," which expresses many of my feelings about the anti-mask contingent of this country, anyway.
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