Medusa's Head

A Response to "Calling Her Home," Brenda Shaughnessy, Interior with Sudden Joy It's a familiar story. From the small room, the women go flying, the lost mothers, a brief selection: as when a little girl how can I breathe! What song, devil, is best flying off, her mouth opening haunting the black air. Each one, a benediction, a blood stain.

Some lovely poems by Susan Rich : " Cloud Pharmacy ," " The Invention of Everything Else " Susan Rich What I most love about these poems is their complicated relationship with desire. Resistance and fascination tangle in these poems about female speakers and their desire for their male beloveds--and yet the discourse of romance isn't untroubled, easy, taken for granted. Instead there are complications, threats, perhaps even structural ones bigger than individuals: "an all-embracing/ ocean view" and "The pharmacist’s paper cone/ parsing out a quarter cup." Agency is complicated in these lyrics, and so, somehow, more accurate to the language of desire.

This Week They Killed Your Best Friend in a Church While He Prayed, Although Many Could Save Your Life He Was The Only One that Would Now is the time when they are deciding who will decide who owns your body. If you are not a man or a child or a virgin you are a cruise ship, or your body is a cruise ship and you are the captain and if the ship goes down so will you. They decide if tiny people can kill you. You might have thought, oh yay, finally, my tiny person is coming only to discover they will brutalize you. The undertaker will have to stuff you so you won't look caved in for your casket though you don't have to die, you could maybe keep your body a little longer-- your body, whose job you thought it was to keep you alive and take you to work this body which is all you know has been lying to you. It is not yours. It never was. It is somebody else's, or could be just like that. And whether that person is alive, or will be for long your body, your long lost first love or ...