Signature Editions

A contemporary retelling of the story of Cassandra, Rhonda Douglas’s Some Days I Think I Know Things explores what "truth" really means and asks what Homer’s iconic young prophetess might have to say to anyone wise enough to pay heed to her in the twenty-first century.

We find Cassandra walking among us once more and, just prior to the sacking of a Troy not unlike any modern city, she sheds light on the idyllic domestic life that she shares with her father Priam, mother Hecuba, and the rest of her doomed, if royal, family. No sooner has she relished in the timeless sexual awakening dreamt about by most girls, than she must stoically submit to the indignities of the invading Greeks. As a captive, she pronounces a series of prescient "Lost Prophesies" intended for our time.

However much her Cassandra remains faithful to the figure of the ancients, Douglas destabilizes her heroine’s primacy as "truth-teller" with a witty, varied chorus whose voices we can’t fail to recognize from the quotidian of our present-day lives. Questions about how to construct personal narrative, the imminence of environmental apocalypse, and the power of young girls make Rhonda Douglas’s first book of poetry a fresh and unforgettable look at what causes the present to tick so inevitably from times immemorial.

Being Cassandra

Some years of knowing what a child knows:
how to hide, what quiet means. Grow into
your body, the unwanted truth of being a woman

and not some other thing. At eleven, begin
by saying out loud words that are true, confirmed
by shock in widening eyes, the quick hot censor

of what’s withheld. For your own protection,
your mother says. Already there is no truth between you.
Go walking, unaware the gods are envious

of beauty, and death — a natural order beyond
their reach. If they play with you now, they can
watch from a distance for what happens next.

Go to the temple. Be reminded in its silence
of the sky and all that continues in the distance.
See Apollo. Know immediately what he is looking

for here, what possession might feel like.
Want, don’t want, want again: does it matter?
Negotiate your own terms, then give in. Fall,

fall down into sweetness. Ask for a gift,
concede. Change your mind. Find his
anger irrelevant, now that you can see.

Don’t Forget Paris

My singing drove everyone nuts and
Paris was a whiner. (Mom, she’s singing again,
make her stop. She’s touching me. I am not.)
Singing Blue Moon in the backseat, Crazy in the front.

We played toy cars in a dirt city. To get in,
honk at the gates and shout the password.
Once he cheated and snuck in when I wasn’t looking.
Little shit! Cheaters never prosper, Paris.

Tell the truth now, Cassandra: they do, Mom said,
it shouldn’t work that way but it does,
usually. I stopped playing with him after that.

He was always just the baby. Once a baby
always a baby in a family where Daddy rules
and the boys are kings. Get away with murder
or near it. But you couldn’t blame him,
his eyes would drag you into complicity:
Don’t tell, Cassandra, don’t tell.

History’s lost to us. We’re tempted to
tart it up and give it a rosy glow
from the embers only.
This much I know:

I loved Paris in the springtime.
I loved Paris in the fall.