Just a Little More Medusa Than Marilyn Monroe
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
They prefer us luminous and breakable,
all surface and suggestion—
smiling with our throats exposed,
calling it power
because it photographs well.
They teach us early
that beauty is safest
when it asks for nothing,
when it reassures,
when it never looks back.
Marilyn knew this.
The performance of softness.
The cost of being adored
only as long as you remain consumable.
But I have learned something else.
I have learned what happens
when a woman survives
and does not transmute the experience
into grace.
When she keeps the edges.
When she lets her anger calcify
into something useful.
When she refuses to make herself
easy again.
They call this a warning.
They say Medusa was monstrous,
as if the crime were not the violence,
but the aftermath—
as if the true transgression
was not being harmed,
but being changed by it.
I am no longer interested
in being ornamental.
In being proof
that the world did not mark me.
I have no desire
to be palatable
at the expense of my own coherence.
If my gaze unsettles,
so be it.
It is only dangerous
to those accustomed
to looking without consequence.
I am still beautiful—
just not in ways
that invite consumption.
There are snakes where curls once were,
yes.
But they are vigilant.
They remember.
And if I am less Marilyn now,
less yielding, less luminous, less safe—
it is because survival
taught me something softness never could.
I am not here to be admired
into silence.
I am here, alive,
with my eyes open.
Just a little more Medusa
than Marilyn Monroe.
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