CALAMITY
MEDUSA VARIATIONS
we don’t know how you do it my sisters say how can you even stand
to be around him i don’t i tell them i
float it’s worse when i’m alone can’t seem to strap myself down and replant
nematocysts in the skin even the smallest current can trigger a breath
at the back of the neck can set my body stoney don’t you
come near me don’t you dare
touch the water darker than a ring of blood or the corpses of my sisters
flashing at the surface the way bolts of lightning
strike a wave by morning we’ll form a bloom wash up on the beach front
blue-lipped and tangled in kelp silver women you’ll net and hook if you can
look through me i won’t make a sound touch me small god
offer your hand
//
tell me were you just a man trapped
in the body of a translucent fish down fathoms of darkness
i sank where you spawned the oceanic chasm
where i’d drowned before to find you only a man and men i can hook i said
pressed a switchblade to my head and cut my curls until they twitched
into tentacles anything you touched i wanted
sliced from my body even the light reached into me
and fluttered like black veins against lobes of the heart
so the shadows marbled so on your body blind i’d fix my eye
//
sisters i want to live far away from men suspended in
a volcanic vent as though sulfur could cauterize my mouth
an orb of water he entered tentacles barbed barred his hips
what pulled him in pulled him in pulled him in
where the wave breaks where bones can split a temple the gullet the flesh
divided only by a beat of salt when i say he turned me
the way a stone spins down a net drawn back to a boat deck i mean
i will rend a rift in the seabed sow polyps of hatred the necessary
venom one thousand medusas will rise from
M’Bilia Meekers was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana with roots in Belgium and Sierra Leone. She has received fellowships from Poets & Writers and the Cave Canem Foundation. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Guernica, Tinderbox, and Poet Lore. She lives in Brooklyn and is an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University.