Megan Duffy | Io Before the Bosphorus | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Megan Duffy is a legal research librarian and poet. Recent poems have appeared in Bath House and FrozenSea. Her poems have been set to music by composer Randall Woolf and performed by Kathleen Supové, Duo Étrange, and Oren Fader and Jessica Bowers. She was a finalist for the 2024 Plenitudes Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City.

Also by Megan Duffy: The Shrine of St. Joseph, Guardian and Redeemer Governess of Floods

July 30, 2025

Megan Duffy

Io Before the Bosphorus

Dawn with her jagged nail rips the last bolts of night. A lone heifer stands in the field below. Her pelt impossibly white as if moon-forged, or goddess-grazed. An opal milked of its cristobalite. She is so thoughtlessly herself, standing all day in her sustenance. What does she know of remorse? What does she know of renunciation? I want to place my palm on the upslope of her skull. Would I feel a pulsing there — a slight vibration? Once, I let a man strike my thighs with a crop. I became his willing canvas of capillaries. What did I care about shame? What did I care about humiliation? It was only the thought of his wife that broke me into a beast. Now I wear her rage like a fetid hide. Dawn has done her work. Light moves like scalpel across the field. Blood rims the circles of the heifer’s eyes. Her head brindled with blowflies.

I have always been drawn to the myth of Io. I feel it lends itself to a modern day discussion of body image, shame, burden and jealousy. Greek mythology is a constant inspiration, and I find these lesser myths have much to tell us.