A Tangle of Gorgons

The lesbians that lived in the apartment to the left

of my grandmother’s were always described in whispers.

        Caught in her teeth, her jokes: a pile of serpents

        thrown at her neighbors for stealing her appetite

                —always hurried, always hushed, hissing her sissies

                & scissoring  as if the slurs would set them straight.

                       It’s a complex: to return callous to the same snake

                       den reminding you of your own head’s sibilance.

                               I am of that ilk, I suppose: dreadful

                               by happenstance, mere blinking having stopped

                                      many a man in his tracks before me. Forbidden

                                      to enjoy it, this calcified lineage.

                               Like mighty Stheno & Sister Euryale, our family

                               name insists wartime: those of us battling this curse

                       of   loving men never cease to stop making rocks

                       of   them, I, hating their waters, never able to skip any.

                They don’t make it that far. Somehow, always sinking,

                always cracking, always losing parts of  themselves.

        Before my father’s cleaving to fracture, I eroded

        his visage to ruin. I barely recognize

him anymore, call him by his first name;

in my head, shortening the suffix. The second time

        I cried for a man, my heart became a stone

        I’m not sure I can pass off for a body part.

                I don’t often mention it, but I need

                to speak on our history of numbness

                       —the golems we bear to know what it is

                       to bury a heart because someone abused it;

                       

                       how I’ve seen it: every sorrow a reflection

                       I’ve avoided combing through, favoring the gleam

                               of  being shorn bald. I must be specific:

                               I have mirrored these monsters before, severed

                       a personhood & expected it inconsequential.

                       But snakes won’t stop coming out of  my face now.

                Their headless balm of displaced oil, preferring

                the word serpentine to wolfish, litters

              the sink with onyx scales graying as old money,

              losing count of hours lost losing count

       of  bottles of  Nair, losing count of  quarters

       lost promising men that they won’t bite.

Unless unsettled, my mother bites, insisting my series

of settling unsettles her. I am getting upset again,

       steaming at how I am always seen

       as the unintended coven member, learned

              in the ways the women folded their prayers

              as they did their napkins—tucked in the center

                    of  a lap in the center of a man in the center of a table

                    in the center of a lap in the center of a house

                          in the center of  a lapse in the center of a judgment

                          asking why I’m still sitting inside, my uncles ponder,

                                the weatherworn heir, moistened of caches of  secrets

                                of stoners & sisters of sinners in secrets in service

                          of  sexes insistent on serving their bullshit

                          —I’m sure they too would prefer me headless.

                    It is frightening: I come from a stony people,

                    my own uncle’s middle name meaning gem.

              My grandma was clever like that, slipped regal

              wishes into her children as if to imbue

          them with crowns instead of  petrifying them.

          We are skilled in this type of sorcery,

  tangling regret with dissatisfaction

  when sulking a sorry might not be enough.

       But, it slinks off our lips anyway,

       disdain’s silhouette appearing only in light

              of our gorgonry, this, our mother tongue,

              how we stilled our anguish, scarred our statues

                    of psyches so, our countenances bled millennia

                    before we ever turned to stone.

                          Hear them whisper what my secret is:

                           I have hardened for men many a day,

                                wantoned my waist round unwanted Perseans

                                 just to see if  I could still do it again.

                           I wound. They whined. They slunk. They swung.

                           They spat. They struck. They slung that weak shit

                     like they just knew they were hitting it right

                     —their ego, its scissor, a sword-swallowing cut

               intent on making a trophy of me—I’m stunned.

               My God. They never remember the head.