Relegated

By Anne Graue

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Of course, Hestia was overlooked &
left in the home to tend the fire.

The existence of tigers didn’t 
interest her in the least 

as she moved from chore to chore 
in the alliterative space. She stoked 

& regulated, stirred & heated,
rationing what others would eat 

& probably complain about. 
She dreamed of having equal time 

with marmosets & lemurs—
that was not her story. She barely 

made the Pantheon’s top ten—
decidedly on the B-list. She made clean 

what was dirty, warmed what went cold. 

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Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press, 2020), and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Find more of her poetry in Sundress Publications Best Dressed Blog, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Unbroken Journal, and River Heron Review. Her book reviews have been published in The Kenyon Review and The Rumpus. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.

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