The New Mythology
Z.T. Corley
My girl-self waits outside her mother’s closed door.
A new mythology is forming.
Her mythology forms, adapts, and becomes
something darker than an ultra-black fish.
Darker than an ultra-black fish, she disappears,
like most daughters, as a survival tactic.
Other survival tactics include: silence
as natural response, shame as natural state.
Shame is as natural as an authoritarian state.
There is a myth of a girl who bore a god.
She bore a god and suffered the required blood.
Childbirth is both war and ceasefire.
Childhood is a war without ceasefire.
My girl-self waits outside her mother’s closed door.
Z. T. CORLEY is a Tennessee-based poet with roots in Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi. She recently graduated from Austin Peay State University with a B.A. in English and she will be an M.F.A. Candidate at Georgia College & State University starting in Fall 2026. She was nominated for the Intro Journal Awards. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Roanoke Review, Revolute, Outskirts, Callaloo, Kawandi Magazine, Saartjie Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a poetry collection while serving as a reader for Callaloo.