CONTENT WARNING: Sexual violence.
Dear Medusa,
How many women must
Fight flight and freeze
Their way through love until
They can turn their enemies to stone?
Medusa,
How is it we have it backwards?
That a single glance
From his direction leaves me
White in the face with feet of stone.
Why couldn’t I move?
Medusa,
Where were you
When I thought
A cold, hard no would be enough
To freeze him in his tracks?
How is it
He has left tracks over my skin
Like a car breaking on concrete
Except he didn’t stop,
And I stained the concrete instead?
Medusa,
Why didn’t he turn to stone like the stories say?
Why does he get to get away?
And who’s to say
If he took my body first
I’m a monster if I take his life away?
After all, they say a body is just a body.
Does it count—
Medusa,
For what is a crowd of women
Sitting in a courtroom
If not a cemetery of stolen souls?
What are we
If not frozen in time?
Tell me,
How I still freeze under the warmest of people—
To this day,
I wonder how I had the strength to not take my own life away
When he took mine like it was his own.
But he’s living, and I’m a monster.
Medusa,
Do you freeze when you look at yourself in the mirror
And see a tombstone?
Do you
Ever want to tear yourself open to rid yourself of a man you mistook for a god?
When you lie asleep,
Do you mistake your hair for him trying to slither his way back to you?
Do you
Sleep with one eye open?
I did too,
Hoping he’d do half the things he’d do to me when I had both eyes closed.
Medusa,
Would you blame me
If I told you I fantasize
About how they’d look
As they turn cold
The day I seek vengeance on my life?
Tell me,
How does it feel to drain the life out of the man that drained you of innocence?
Does revenge taste better when he lies cold?
Medusa,
I heard you have quite the garden!
An assortment of monsters you’ve stilled in their tracks
For the mere crime of glancing your way.
Heard you collect the bodies as trophies,
Put your sunglasses on and invite your friends over to take a whack at whatever body they’d like.
Funny,
Where I’m from, we wouldn’t call that a monstrous act, no.
Those are the actions of a man.
Mellowdramma is a Haitian-Canadian slam poet based in Montreal. She believes that art is a medicine that allows people to connect with their emotions, others, and the parts of ourselves that rarely see the light.
Featured image by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash.
