Medusa

Tsaurah Litsky

I buy a postcard Medusa
at St. Marks bookstore.
Standing under an angry gray sky,
she is wearing red lipstick, smiling,
her hair a mass of wiry black snakes.

This modern Medusa
doesn’t look like a monster,
she is too beautiful,
but I have learned how
monsters are good at disguises,
just as I have learned
that many men think
women are monsters,
with teeth sprouting from our labia,
our vaginas dentata,
that is why they must make myths
out of us
and have been doing so
since the beginning of time,

I can not be an ivory Aphrodite
worshipped for her genius and beauty
or a happy streetwalker
with a rosebush between my legs,
an updated version of Henry Miller's Germaine,
for better or worse,
my mind and body are the same,
I understand why people
kill for love,
like Medusa, I have cobras on the brain,
but I don’t want to turn men to stone
with my face or wield the terrible power of my sex
before me like a shield,
I would rather be Tiresias,
blind, hermaphrodite prophet,
doomed to speak
only what I can hear and feel,

in the exploding fires
of the sexual embrace
not even the gods know
what is real.

c.2001