Medusa with the Head of Perseus

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.