venus de milo
Mina Jameson


zeus beckons us to fall into his rapture like babies falling off windowsills into streets where their heads break like cantaloupes bursting and he tells us that his sin and his devil will lead our way to some kind of shangri-la paradise on the border of mars, we let down our hair at night and smother our faces in faulty guilt and mommy’s herbal teatime soother, fissure breaks in our perfections like runs in our stockings and our mothers call us whores when we leave the house with our blouses loose on our feminine house frames, like bricks and cans and tin roofs cause we are shanty women living in the crumbing formations of our lumpy bodies that we wear as proudly as sophisticated grown up manhattan women wear their bodies, you see, they’re trying to turn us inside out, and there’s nowhere to hide when no mans land is every corner of this planet and running only makes it worse, you see, they’re trying to tell us that we’re not beautiful enough to be women, not whole enough to be real or mystical reality, we’re goddesses living in little girls that speak words of other broken nighttime ladies that you see riding busses rocking down wrong way streets, we’re all on this collapsing boat of an america where they tell us to keep roaring through the ocean whose faces in waves are telling us to turn back because there’s nothing good for us in paradise, for love, girl, we have to go back to the house of eden, ink in our pistols so you can smoke on my words like you swish bullets in your teeth, abstract reality is a world where they won’t cut us along our seams and twist us into baby dolls who will gladly fall out the windows to break at the bottom, listen to me, never break for them – never break for the man who knocks at your door when the man behind your bed is so eagerly waiting with that knife, never break for those mothers who scold you like baby swines, never break for the children who fuel this raging war of femininity versus female as if our wounds aren’t screaming as loud as we are, never break before a deity who sentences you to life of battling your own worshiper, never break for the people who will try to ruin you like you are nothing more than the last woman they tore apart.

down, down, down, and we always shatter like obedient scapegoats at the bottom and when there’s no other place for us to turn because we’re lost in a metropolis of semen and seamen, we hide inside ourselves, pulling our lumpy shanty bodies into wooly winter forts dragging over kitchen chairs and the couch and the tv, we hide underneath the pillows between the walls so thin we can hear our parents crying at our purging, we’re lost in a place called mr magician’s society remedy bought only from trailer park maidens, and we down it’s false prophecies in teaspoons twice the dose because maybe we won’t purge if it’s something to make us real and viable like good organs that go into sick people because we were once healers and sorcerers and so magic we surpassed humanity and breathed olympus air and we are that beautiful. but for now, they’re going to tell us that we’re ugly, and they’re going to beat us with our remedies and our ideology of humanity and when they’re done beating us down and beating us to death, maybe they’ll realize how precious we actually are, and maybe they’ll stop hurting us for being lovers and stop hurting us for being saviors, but until then, let’s not cover our wounds to muffle their thundering voices and let’s raise our armour to a sun-struck apollo glistening with running sweat, and break their backbones if they try to touch us like they have before.
 
 
←     →