Richard Holinger’s fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Chautauqua, The Southern Review, Witness, SIR, Hobart, Prime Number, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Nominations include the Pushcart Prize (7), Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and published in Best Microfiction 2025. Publications include North of Crivitz (poetry, Kelsay Books); Down from the Sycamores (poetry chapbook, Finishing Line); Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences (humor, Dreaming Big); Unimaginable Things (stories & novella, Main Street Rag Publications) and Manure Dreams (essays, Winner, Choeofpleirn Press Nonfiction Award 2025, one a “Notable” in 2018 Best American Essays). He holds a Ph.D. from UIC and survived as a secondary school teacher and adjunct instructor for forty years. He lives in rural northern Illinois.
Please visit: www.richardholinger.com
Exhausted after games of love not played
for twenty years, she lay beside him marveling
on how divine he made her feel.
“Odysseus, you’ve brought back bedroom tricks
I didn’t know you knew,” the gallant wife began,
doubt quivering her finger-tip massage.
“News reached our shores ten years ago you’d stung
the city like a wasp. Perhaps you then amused
your thirst in other ways than spilling wine
down parched men’s throats?
I hear a witch can claim men’s love
the way an ass owns stubbornness.”
Controlling calm within his breast like Zeus
will yearn to send a thunderclap and then, relenting,
wafts a whispered breeze, Odysseus explained:
“My antelope Penelope, you know my love of words.
I wish to tell you all. My only thought in not unloading
all the verbal cargo plundered from my wandering
was sparing you more grief, as what the suitors did
to wound you would have felled a slighter wife.
I was, although, surprised to hear with beggar’s ears
you thought to marry one today if he restrung my bow
and shot his arrow mainmast straight.”
“I knew no one but you, if bow bent right,
could thread the dozen ax heads in a row,
but that’s beside the point.
You weave a conversation into patterns
meant to hide your flaws.
My question’s aimed at hearing of the long
digressions on your way to hurry home.”
“And you would rather not disclose the secrets
of suitors who came to call and call so long,
hounding my house like mongrels, eyeing
what I can only surmise a bitch in heat
who looks askance but not away?”
With that his wife sprang out of bed,
her mother’s frame shaking with rage:
“You dare to doubt my best defense against
those vipers after you come back from whoring
goddesses whose tricks you learned, then I,
in turn, learned in ecstasy last night?”
The long-awaited limber, but spent husband
crept from bed and dropped before his womb.
“You’re right about the sorceress
who chained my will between her legs with spells
from which no mortal man could free himself
without the fear of injuring her petty pride.
Immortal Circe wrapped my friends in pork
and would have poisoned me as well had not
bold Hermes given me a potion slaying wayward stew.
With sword against her breast—as ankle-winged god
advised me to—I threatened her headless
if she not turn swine back into men.”
“You didn’t ask yourself, ‘Since when do deathless
women die’? If this recounting be truth,
then press your memory for facts absolving you
of sainted sin, not misremembered artifacts
sewn in webs of lies like Ariadne’s weave.”
With that, her husband rose, his red face crowing,
“You question me what harm my sword
could do to mouse or Zeus? Have you forgotten
terror meted out? I would have made the rest
of Circe’s life as agonizing as Poseidon’s surf,
sliced her to pieces for my porcine friends
in lunatic retreat to sniff before gobbling her up.”
“And what then, noble king? You brought them
to your long-oared ship with orders home?
You would have been back years ago.
I’ll bet instead you grazed in Circe’s field,
your nose in her pungent clover.”
“Enough!” the proud Achaean blurted. “Quick Hermes
told me, ‘Lie with her,’ his words. Would you
have disobeyed the messenger who saved your life
with golden drops of honey dew?
And if I hadn’t done my best in bringing pleasure
to her bed, who knows the evil she’d have wrought!
My meeting with Hades’ fleshless dead
euphoria compared to casting clothes aside
and striding shipwrecked onto sands of satin sheets,
deceiving her with painful ecstasy aroused with visions
of my wife who, I thought, would be consumed
with hateful thoughts of widowhood, sobbing
lovely limbs to sleep each night, moaning
in delicious agony to see once more her husband’s ghost.”
“And no way was there off her land?
Where’d you leave your well-sped loyal ship
while filling Circe’s fantasies?”
“She’d woven me in webs
of timelessness, my months ensnared
by seconds, years entangled in an hour.”
Penelope punched a finger in her archer husband’s heaving chest.
“That is how precisely long ago you rhapsodized
of life with me and young Telemachus before
you slept…how long with her?”
“A mere one year she trapped me there, my mind impervious
to season, sun, and lunar shifts, her ghostly grip
on me so moribund I might have died
unlessoned by Apollo’s light.”
“A full earth’s cycle you remained so impotent?
Odysseus, your fame as fabricator never blew with Aeolian
winds so clear. And in how many other beds
were you forced to labor?”
“Not one—unless you count the nymph Calypso’s, but
you must agree that that was nothing more
than hospitality: she saved me from Poseidon’s salty claws
that scratched, then threw me on her beach.
Once finished each night with what she had me do,
I strolled down to vine-green sea to pine for you
And our only son as no bard ever spilled his grief.”
“Oh, please, Odysseus!” the queen cried out
and leaped beneath the blanket where her muffled voice
emerged: “Hold still your tongue before I laugh
with incredulity. Your truth is false as suitors’ garlic-
scented allegiances of love. Let me, instead, conclude
your tale. You landed last at King Alcinous’s court
(who else but those Phaeacian maritime magicians steered
you here?) where you politely acquiesced to pluck
his ripened daughter Nausicaa beneath Diana’s orb
on pearly beach while Aeolus combed nocturnal tunes
Through the lovely girl’s brine-encrusted hair.”
“Now there you’re wrong,” broad-shouldered Odysseus
shouted at the sheet-enshrouded shape. “It’s true
she saved me from my hunger, thirst, and cold,
but keep my distance from her lithe, sleek,
well-proportioned frame I did. Except
the time I kneeled nakedly before her, begging
indulgence for a rat drowned twenty days at sea.”
Up kicked the queen’s legs, and covers flew across
the room like storm-swept clouds. “Duplicity revealed!”
she screamed, jumped out of bed, and beat him
with fists that felt little more than raindrops on his skin.
“You conjure up that nomistic sea god
every time you need to be a victim, not a heartless,
two—or five, or ten—timing husband dawdling homeward.”
The wily seaman grabbed her hand and held it
like a baby’s rattle. “When lounging longingly on Calypso’s rock,
I did not yearn for a wife’s anger or retribution. How many nights
my fantasies wandered over wine-dark seas to settle on
your velvet, golden conical breasts as Circe’s leaf-dark thighs
suspended me, not this rash display of temper.
Have I returned to be harangued by Scylla,
my bones crushed between her marble jaws?
Or by Charybdis, who would swallow me
in verbal pools of accusation meant
to drive a roving oarsman mad?”
With that he let her go and wrestled
into his clammy cloak two decades hung closeted.
“Abuse inflames cold cinders’ smoldered ash,”
he whispered. “Once long ago, as king,
when I had need to visit offshore nations
you would scoff as though I only wanted
to lift heavy spears, hurl the discus, and wrestle
compatriots. Returning after years of creaking oars
and listless sails, all night long I had to listen
to insinuations sharper than Cicone war cries.”
With that, and with a hand held out like golden horn
proclaiming victory, the muscle-heavy royal
reached the bedroom door.
Legs grounded like a warrior over fallen foe,
Penelope stood stock-still and waved farewell.
“Be gone, disgraced, ignoble one. Go search for a bed
more worthy than mine. Though you
and Telemachus have just dispatched
the best our land holds forth for married loins,
I’ll not wait long before I have my fill
of unmarried men along with a myriad
who will quickly leave their discourteous wives.”
The latch clicked under Odysseus’ touch
before he once more weighed a spoken lance,
then turned and hurled it with Hectorian verve:
“No wonder mother walked so boldly
into the phlox-blue sea. Like Helios whips
his thunderous steeds across the prairie
of open sky, you drove her to horizons’ end.
It wasn’t my absence that did her in, longing
for a son long-gone, but your infernal testimony
to injured pride. Goodbye, unfair Penelope.
I’m off for craggy shores unhinged
from domesticity, where olive-dark
enchantresses licentious as seductive
sirens’ song will circle my girth
with words of love, forgiveness, and merriment,
not questions steered to flabbergast a king.”
With that he turned to go, and well it was,
for sandals tossed toward the parting hero
heaved by hands well-versed in fight of flight
thudded off the half-closed door.
“Go back and stew on Hecate’s brew,
adulterous Odysseus!” she threw at him,
halting the savage besieger of cities
like a Trojan sword well-sprung.
Had not the wise Athena intervened to placate
unrepentant queen and proud, contumely king
would have turned a marital spat
into one of Ares’ elaborate displays, the bloodbath
in the Hall made to resemble merely a Bacchic brawl.
Instead, good Pallas spread above the tenured marriage bed
a silver mist of sleep that hove from sight all sacrilegious bickering.
And when dawn’s finger rose rose-red above the island’s
sleep-bejeweled eyes, it rubbed unsightly nightmares into seas
only Oblivion would spy on, and the massive arms
of clever King Odysseus played once again their part
encircling his Queen Penelope’s warm, welcoming heart.
Poetry in this post: © Richard Holinger
Published with the permission of Richard Holinger