he doesn’t deserve a poem.
An eye for an eye, maybe; a cry for a cry, yes,
but there’s nothing beautiful about lead knuckles and sharp words,
bruises and tears,
haunted clothes you can never wear again,
and tears at the seams of a psyche already chiffon thin.
Then again, you write best when you’ve been wronged;
that’s the terrible truth, the painful compensation of bending almost broken.
When Lennon was shot by a man full of prose and psychosis,
the News wouldn’t say the assassin’s name.
They didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of fame.
When I didn’t say yours, I was deemed a liar and tip-toed through shadows
for a year and a day.
Once upon a time there lived a Grecian maiden swathed in silk and skin,
sitting like a siren by the sea,
staring at the descending spiral above.
It was a stately white swan
aiming for the security of the woman’s bosom,
claiming to be in distress.
She opened her arms without thought
and the swan seized the chance to display that he was a veritable bird of prey,
using primordial violence to desecrate and feast on the flesh of Leda.
This gave way to mimesis,
as if tragedy was a tableaux, open for dissection,
and now everyone knows the story.
Oh, boys will be boys and Zeus will be Zeus
and it’s her fault, really, for looking so pretty and alone out there,
lost in reverie and delectably divine.
This incident spawned a hundred arts and more:
it hatched young Helen, an infamous beauty born of beast, poetry in motion,
with the face that launched a thousand ships across a churning ocean
and tinted those waters wine dark red.
There’s no ugliness like the hunger in a man’s eyes right before he takes a shortcut.
When a bad man touches a good girl,
he doesn’t deserve a poem.
But when a good girl is touched by a bad man,
sometimes she wields beauty
and makes it her weapon.
Gretchen Uhrinek is a young writer studying Creative Writing and Gender Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has been featured in Eloquentia and Girls Don’t Do That. Her hobbies include hiking, bad car dancing, and petting strangers’ dogs. More of her work can be found at writewiththedoorclosed.tumblr.com.