Medusa

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By Steve Castro

            after Hideo Hagiwara (1913-2007)

Looking with your head up, your seductive eyes
made it incapable for your victims to look away.

You held a snake’s head with thumb & ring finger,
as if to pluck, as if to feed.

No pierced earlobe despite countless fangs.
Nipples exposed.

Around your luscious neck, jewels
as bright as those that adorned Lucifer.

There was a sharpness to your silence,
like the sword used to slay you.

Steve Castro‘s debut poetry collection, Blue Whale Phenomena, was published by Otis Books, 2019 (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California). Publications include Plume; DIAGRAM; Green Mountains Review; Forklift, Ohio; Water~Stone Review; So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library; The Florida Review. Three poems (including two prose poems) are forthcoming in Guesthouse, and two prose poems co-written with Daniel Romo are forthcoming in Hotel Amerika. Birthplace: Costa Rica.