Different

You can be sure I was killed by men.

Different is simply failure to match 

their desires. Women are just mirrors

to men’s eyes, and I was broken from the start.

I hobbled along with a crooked spine

and striking face, having come into beauty

as a rose blooms on a thorned and twisted stem. 

Men looked at me in ways in which they later

found revulsion in themselves. So, they spat

on me, until intensity hardened my gaze,

and my hatred grew like a tumor of shards.

Nothing’s more potent than radiant contempt

directed at a man: it challenges and threatens,

intrigues and repels. I heard their worn excuses

for unbefitting lust—whore, she-wolf, witch—while 

dark, complicit silence swallowed their wives

like blackened water in a poisoned well.

After twelve hundred years in a recycled

pit, I’m now on every news site. I’ve escaped

centuries in the grave for this day in the sun.

Oh, what they thought they could deny me

with humiliation and some rope.

The archaeologists, who brushed my bones

with the only tenderness I’ve ever known,

said that my death must have been sudden

and unexpected, that something scared

the villagers into burying me restrained

and in haste. Had I a throat, I’d have laughed.

These men, still trying to explain 

why I was unworthy of my own hole.