Truly, everything is monstrous,
even wild horses and especially
their heads. The tree trunk necks
of boys who finish sandwiches
in three bites and the impatient
lumps that harden in their freshly
bleached briefs. We’re all so warm
and pink, it's obscene. I don't want any
part of it. It took me years to learn
simple tasks: how to snap my fingers,
tie my shoes. My mother's early gaze
full of worry that love would escape
me, too. If I peel back my breast, I'll find her
passport heart, stamps still smeared
from all the quailing in Queens, the tears
in Tel Aviv. She taught me this: the way
a woman travels, under a moving
shadow of small panic; all too aware
that even a plane about to crash,
for one bright, myopic moment,
will fill completely with the sun.
I bought Marilyn Krysl's Diana Lucifera so long ago that I can't barely remember where or when. I believe it was when I lived in Australia. Published in 1983 (when I was one year old), the slim, unassuming text—only slightly bigger than a chapbook—is a product of Shameless Hussy Press, which existed from 1969–89 as the first feminist, women-owned press in the U.S. (see more about that here). The cover is a simple illustration of the statue Diana of Versailles, minus the deer, with a lightly sketched handgun looming behind her. The book consists of 24 poems, all written in couplets, with language that is plainspoken but haunting in its unrelenting address of the reader in the second person ("We know if you / get murdered it's / your fault. Everyone / knows you were prone / to disaster"). It is, in essence, a book about the exploitation of women and the hows and whys of it from both ends—the choices women make, choices that are often taken away from us, and choices that were never ours to make in the first place. There is a murderer in these poems and we, the readers, are the ones about to be murdered, whether we asked for it or not. Or could we not help but ask for it? In poem 19, Krysl writes:
intact, and as he looks you
over he doesn't see terror
you're not afraid, will make him
wrong again: he doesn't give a
the fatal mistake: to assume
want you to feel. Haven't you
learned yet that what you feel
is precisely what interests them
Yes, it was in Australia when I first read this book. I loved Australia but it scared me, because the culture of sexism was blatant and unavoidable there. I dealt with disgusting comments on the street, unwanted advances in clubs, and I was supposed to be okay with it. It did not matter how I felt; that was not of universal interest. The cold public exterior I'd constructed over time—which even my father would comment on, if he caught a glimpse of me walking home from the subway, headphones on and unfriendly scowl in place—was a useless mask for a simple, given vulnerability that the world seemed to fathom inherently. Krysl's poems shed light on a then-dawning realization that it would be my gender, first and foremost, that informed my place in the world. My response, like hers, has been to grapple with that in my written work.
Nicole Steinberg is the editor of Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011) and the author of the chapbook Birds of Tokyo (dancing girl press, 2011). Her poetry has appeared in journals and publications such as BOMB, No Tell Motel, H_NGM_N, Gulf Coast, Moonshot, and elsewhere. She's the founder of Earshot, a New York reading series, and her book "Getting Lucky" is forthcoming from Spooky Girlfriend Press.
