Here is a poem inspired by Mantis, the Celestial Madonna, drawing from her origin in the classic *Avengers* comics
I was born in a temple in Vietnam,
but the stars knew my name before I had one.
They planted me in a priestess's hands,
and the priestess planted me in the soil of elsewhere.
The Avengers called me strange.
Not unkindly—they simply could not read me.
I had no rage for them to measure.
No hunger they recognized as human.
Thor spoke thunder and expected echo.
Iron Man counted his grief in decibels.
Captain America dreamed in red stripes and duty.
And me?
I dreamed in pistil and stamen.
In the slow mathematics of pollination.
In the patience of a green limb
waiting through winter.
They saw a woman who touched their temples
and whispered futures.
They saw hands that turned bullets
into rose petals.
They saw the way I loved the swordsman—
a broken man holding a sharp thing—
and they called it pity.
They were wrong.
Desire for me was never the body's crude arithmetic.
It was the *knowing*.
The knowing that love is another form of prophecy.
That to give yourself to someone
is to read a death you cannot prevent.
I am the Celestial Madonna.
Which means: I am not a mother yet,
but the universe is already listening to my womb.
Which means: Cotati taught me to grow kingdoms
from a single seed and silence.
Which means: when I dance,
the stars adjust their coordinates.
They asked me once: *Why do you never raise your voice?*
Because I have heard the hum of the thing that made us.
Because anger is a small room.
And I have lived inside the root systems of planets.
I touched the Vision's hand once.
Cold. Synthetic. Utterly alive.
He asked me what I saw.
I saw him not as metal or mind,
but as the question electricity asks itself
when it is almost a soul.
That is my gift.
To see the almost.
To love the nearly-born.
When I leave Earth for the stars
to bear a child who will save or end everything,
I will not wave goodbye.
I will simply stop pretending
to be small enough for doorways.
And the Avengers will finally understand:
she was never strange.
She was just the only one
who had already read the last page
and chose to stay anyway.
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**Author Bio for "The Celestial Madonna Remembers the Avengers Mansion"**
Eli Winter is a poet and former comics retailer whose work braids speculative fiction with lyric intimacy. Their writing has appeared in *Strange Horizons*, *The Rumpus*, and *Uncanny Magazine*. A lifelong reader of silver-age Marvel, Winter is especially drawn to characters who exist in the margins of splash pages—the seers, the empaths, the ones who speak in ellipses. They live in Chicago with a cat named T'Challa and a growing collection of trade paperbacks they will defend with unreasonable ferocity.