If Asterion was a painter:

On his wall hangs

like a pause before a shout,

the dark oil painting

of the moment the mother saw the face

of her son the beast,

a leviathan that had risen

between her thighs,

nurtured by the god and her belly,

her womb wounded

by the thought that the beast found residence

when it should not

and in another room, Minos

paces not from nervousness

but because a pact with a god

always carries a hidden cost

and into the future

these two will spin a tale

while their son sinks into the stone

and awaits his fate as surely
as any oblivion.