Bacchanal by Shannon Frost Greenstein

Bacchanal
by Shannon Frost Greenstein

Give me more wine, bloody 
like the stain of Fosse on Pippin’s hands. Give me Ben Vereen, 
sex made incarnate
singing of Charlemagne’s addiction to dopamine and 
glory.

Bread/like security/a trigger in the
lizard brain/reward me/decadence trickling
from gaping mouths, the viscous juice of
supple fruit/dripping down chins/onto
breasts/hunger/licking/satiation

Give me Dionysus, God of madness, God of
ecstasy. Give me Dionysus, the frenzied 
cult of souls, the ecstasy of worship.

Hedonism/hedonism/pleasure/glinting off
golden headdresses/communal rapture as the last high
and delirium, delirium 
to avoid the sunrise.

Give me Zarathustra, the ubermensch, he who is 
a seizure of power, the overcoming
of mediocrity. Give me a deity to 
venerate, to kill.

Men and men and women and 
/fucking/
limbs twining among limbs/byzantine paths of 
thighs and tongues and
climbing/to climax/to clarity

Give me a Bacchanal, to
forget the Buddhist suffering in this world. Give me
a Bacchanal, 
because I just want to feel.

And I can only feel/
when I feel to excess/
like the long-ago followers
of Bacchus, ascending to rapture
and praying for conception
on the dawn of equinox 
at the birth of spring.

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novella forthcoming with Emerge Literary Journal. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, WAS Quarterly, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Shannon was recently a finalist for the 2023 Ohio State University Press Journal Non/Fiction Prize. Follow her on her website at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter and Bluesky at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks https://shannonfrostgreenstein.com/ https://twitter.com/shannonfrostgre https://instagram.com/zarathustra_speaks https://facebook.com/shannongreenstein