CW: none.
This poem sprang from its title, a product of old-school random-generator email spam. I suspect it meant the Anunnaki in their pseudo-scientific incarnations, but I thought of the chthonic demon-deities of the Akkadian underworld who preside over wars, plagues, cataclysms, and judgments: and yet there are marriages made in the land of no return. The state of the land of the living did the rest.
Increase your potency
by as many times as the king of Uruk
came weeping to the bird-faced threshold
where his beloved rotted like a bowl of spoiled beer.
Stay harder all night
longer than the shepherd’s sister
with her spilled lap of agate and carnelian
begged for his half-life.
Do not imagine that we do not love
as avidly as a scab the skin,
a fever the throat, a sword the spine,
that we burn less sullenly
than the ghost’s gate of sunset
or the planet stained like a sacked city’s wall.
Before the flood, the world was for our kindling.
Your rising tide, our fever will not break.
