2 poems by Carol Shillibeer

Ovid’s doctor told him to lay off the saturated fats

I caught Ovid asking for more butter at the cinema’s snack bar. There were six movies playing, so there’s no way to know which one he had come to see, although I thought I knew. But really it was the butter. He used to say he didn’t get any in exile, and cursed-out Augustus using Victorian swears. He’d say that mutton shunter, that mumbling cove. I’d laugh, but Ovid’s face was screwed into the shape of a taper lit sometime early in the afternoon sun. I think butter reminded him of the way light melted into puddles of wax & left the scent of beflowered bees on the table. It sure couldn’t have been the taste. I mean I’ve eaten at that place, and it wasn’t butter at all, and the popcorn—it was like gumming wet fleece. But he liked it, despite the fact that his doctor told him he might finally die if he kept eating it. I was with him that day, at the doc’s. We went to Starbucks after. Got espresso and pastries. When he got his popcorn back, newly wet with golden fat, I reminded him of mortality, and he just smiled. Maybe, he said, . I smiled back, not all that happily. I gave up though, turned around and went back into theatre number one, and the Testament of Orpheus. I didn’t want to miss that flash of colour.

Scylla talks about the day she first ran away from Glaucus

I was 14, she said. What did he expect? Sitting at a table with Scylla next to a cobbled street, where cars were banned, we drank espresso, stirred it with tiny spoons, plopped in crystallized brown sugar. We shared a plate of croissants and grapes. Scylla sighed hard enough to flutter brown flakes of pastry. She, now middle-aged and human again—or at least she looked it.

Are we safe here, do you think? She’d ask me that at every new city, every coffee shop. She wouldn’t use the same Starbucks more than twice. It’s a shame really, that Glaucus lived. What a pest! He wouldn’t let her go, and even if he wasn’t a fish anymore, she didn’t want him. Too bad for him Circe wouldn’t double down on the curse. So, I went with Scylla to many places, but never to the boot-toe of Italy, where the rock that once trapped her still stood. I became her shield in case Fish-dude found her. We talked. Drank coffee. Ate sweetness. Watched people wander by. Sometimes we read from Metamorphoses. Laughed.

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Carol Shillibeer's poems have been published in many print and online publications, and received nominations for both Pushcart and Best of Net. One of her most recent manuscripts, language be like, won the 2025 Alfred G. Bailey Prize for poetry.