Medusa With The Head Of Perseus
By TorrinA. Guesthouse
Fiberglass reinforced resin, Luciano Garbati, 2008
1
I do not want to speak about the beginning
of this story. Were my scalp a wreath or crown
of mouths, still, I would not open.
But you already know the myth: Rape
that made the body punishment for itself.
2
Instead begin with the body—itself a kind
of ending. A new mythology, the severance
of two heads. Where her thighs meet, no
gash, sex mouthed into injury, no coiled
viper against her groin. Instead, a pale gap
in stone’s imagination—a dream my body
swallows. Each pill a small cut,
a slow beheading.
3
My mother says her first crime was beauty,
that my father’s was how he imagined himself
a god. Call me bloodcurse, fair hair shriveled
& sprouting teeth, stain across the temple
floor. Do not make me tell this story
without a forked tongue. Before me
there was a mother & a god—I mean
a man—& a choice. Imagine, her body a home.
Call my father burglar, my birth a breaking
& entering. At least this crime gives a name
to the shatter. Invents a reason for the curse
birthed into this body.
4
O, serpent-headed girl, mirror
that statues its reflection, I blink
& all the stonework shatters.
I sweep a sea of mirrors into my palm
& suddenly I am wearing my mother’s
face, all these failed children sharpened
into my skin—the bathroom a flood
of tiny cardinals. Cells that divide & twine
a scarlet thread slithering down my wrist.
5
My family is the myth of an animal devouring
itself. What is an ouroboros but a body, or a story,
without a beginning or an end. Medusa braids
her fingers through her ending’s soft brown hair
& takes off his head. A story swallows its first
words, forgets where it is going. My mother
disowns me & suddenly I am a folktale.
Am I the serpent-headed girl? Or her endless
reflection? Or the winged mare burst
forth from her blood? Child of slaughter.
Wound from the mouth of a wound.
6
I drag the thread of scarlet
feathers from my palm & watch
my body’s unbraiding. How
a gene, when pulled, unravels a child.
My DNA, a two-tailed snake,
swallowing my father’s face.
I see Perseus’s head dangling
from Medusa’s hand & know
transition like this—to hold
a violent man’s face in your hands,
to set him & his blood aside.