from The Medea notebooks
Medea after having just been Diagnosed as a nymphomaniac
You’re going to have to tell me what that means. He’s Greek. English is his third language. I want to tell him that desire is like a weather of the mind. But I know he’s looking for a more precise definition. You could say it means that a woman can’t get enough. Only women? Yes, actually. I think it has something to do with nymphs and Greek mythology. You know. Apollo. Dionysus. Or maybe it was just some crazy theory of Freud’s. I can never remember.
I take his hand. I know he’ll be asleep soon. And move it down between my legs. He doesn’t resist. I move it further down. To that place that seems to lie on the other side of attention. Exists always on the other side of winter. I’m going to eat you. I’m going to eat all of the light out of you. I watch myself turn into a body of glass. First flame, then the ache of something slow. Ancient. Something that feels almost like metamorphosis.
Three of the Men Medea has slept with at Work
I didn’t have to invent a reason to be here. I knew I had birthed myself into this. The struggle to get down between his legs. Hold on, just move the steering wheel up a bit… I saw him in the hallways afterwards, an animal devouring itself. I knew then that he had no beginning and no end. There are so many ways a woman makes the body a punishment for itself.
He told me he had had a two-tailed lizard when he was a kid. Three glasses of wine and I pulled him into a storage closet. I found blood on my skirt afterwards. As I walked back into the party I over-heard a man ask his wife who the serpent-headed woman was. Threads of scarlet bloomed between my legs. I went out to the pool house, crawled into the bathtub, and fell asleep.
Fourth floor of the building parking lot. No, I’ve never done it with a woman. He’s having trouble pulling my pantyhose down. Just let me go down on you a little bit. I looked down at him. A grown man on his knees like this. Like he was going to pray to the Virgin Mary. I grabbed the railing and watched as he sucked all of the holiness out of me.
Medea stabs her two children through the Heart with a hunting knife she Bought at Dick’s Sporting Goods
They will say I did it as an act of vengeance
Now God is surely waiting for me in his milky garden
From this day forth all of my trees will be red
I would say something more about this
But my mouth is full of sleep shapes and mute ash
A women in pain is a terrible
You can smell it between her legs from a mile away,
Ann Pedone graduated from Bard College and has a Master’s degree in Chinese from UC Berkeley. Ann is the author of the chapbook “The Bird Happened.” Her work has recently appeared in Riggwelter, Main Street Rag, Poet head, Cathexis Northwest, The Wax Paper, and The Phare, among others.