Sphinx Poems

Mina Troise
→ BFA ILL 2025

The Sphinx and I, on Mondays, Mostly

The Sphinx has a job: to be confounding.
It’s a pretty good gig, 9 to 5, with generous paid leave.
She would not necessarily say she is fulfilled by
being confounding, which is disheartening. I mean,
if we cannot derive meaning from what we excel at, then what else is there?

I ask the Sphinx for wisdom on days when my tits look particularly uneven,
or when I feel like making excuses for the men I am disappointed by.
She doesn’t answer, really, not with words;
she just sits there, smelling faintly of car exhaust.

She crouches, she’s always crouching,
poisonous and wordless and beautiful,
drawing her gaze over me with a rushing feeling like
a eucalyptus branch skimmed over a body of clean water.

I asked the Sphinx for help because my writing is turning out poorly.
She draws a symbol in the air that I don’t recognize.
It singes me, and I wish it were all so much simpler
but she leaves me with that red sizzle
cast neon with omnipotence,
made agonizing by my utter incomprehension.
It’s something kinder than a cattle brand,
but the sting stays with me longer.

The Sphinx on Casual Fridays

The Sphinx is self-pitying lately.
She wears too much heather gray; always sweating right through it,
souring the air with a perfume of all the pennies in a brackish fountain.
Her water’s been hard lately, a hand slowly wringing at her scalp.
Acutely, she knows her body,
which is a thimble turned wishful with rust.

The Sphinx keeps her cardigan on the back of her desk chair,
where it sits, waiting for her to catch a chill.
It drags down invisibly, empty arms reaching for the skid of the carpet.
The Sphinx bears down on the stapler and feels her meat wrapping around its blackness.
She imagines being a piece of clay. She imagines the safety of a hydraulic press.

The Sphinx is no good at riddles this week.
Her molt is late, and it’s starting to prickle, and she’s running out of PTO.
She plucks her gray hairs dutifully, feverishly,
a dalliance with her mirror,
a desperate courtship with her tweezers.

She dreams, still, of a mouth like a tawny scythe,
of limbs scoured pure by sandman’s sand
of scapulae unfolding like great white blades.

She dreams of being undone by sudden freedom
and soaring somewhere palmed and all-inclusive

setting herself down beneath a striped umbrella,
tucking into a bodice-ripper, and devouring everything.

Mina Troise is curious what will bloom this spring.