Medusa's Daughter

By Jane Rosenberg LaForge

In Daphne and Her Discontents, Jane Rosenberg LaForge investigates the relationship between fathers and daughters. She returns with Medusa’s Daughter, in which she wrestles with the legend of Medusa to explore the life and legacy of her own mother. A simultaneous act of homage, and revision, Medusa’s Daughter asks whether an inheritance is fate or merely a template that can be rejected or embraced. The poems also explore how one anonymous woman, seemingly consigned to a life designed by patriarchal culture, still influenced generations, and inspired them to live on their own terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716311147

Book preview

Author

Medusa’s Resources

Instead of the luxurious shafts

of screens and radio advertisements,

she is given a wiry batch

stinging at the eyes

as if diamond-backed:

Black and rusted, and in an age

when she will know children,

an inevitable absence, 

like an assault beyond the scalp,

into the smooth muscle inside

the cranium.

Not exactly snake-like 

but conscious patterns

copied from the anonymous,

discovered quickly, repeated,

when no one is watching

and when discovered again,

they are abandoned.

They’re how she keeps straight 

notions of the past

in a non-language,

from German to its

Hebrew and Swiss variants,

to describe non-incidents

embedded in the form although

everyone has their own model

regardless of whether they can admit it.

So when she asks which feminine

hygiene products are in stock,

she is brought a diaper,

accepts it in a rage of embarrassment.

When she solves the puzzle

of war, liberation, and economics 

tearing family and community apart

she expects an award of more time

but is undecided between Greenwich Mean

and Pacific Standard. Time pours,

spills, inundates she suspects

she’s been robbed. She’ll invest

the rest of her life searching

for orphaned minutes.

After a full circle, pre- and post-meridian,

the identity of seconds remains ambiguous.

They are lodged somewhere between embers

and splatters, the ash from hard black

anthracite, the seat of madness

and origins, the venoms

she was born with.

Medusa’s Speech

Meduser, is how she’d say it,

like algeber for the calculations

her mother loved; and a few other words

I’d kill to know right now

because I’ve failed to remember

what ended in consonants 

she snipped off with like the stems

of roses, with her lower register.

She neutered words, though we

didn’t know to call it at the time. We just knew

she was smarter than our father.

She took these and other kinds

of liberties, shaving vowels 

switching letters as though she were

speaking Spanish; another distinction

between herself and the natives

who held on to their youth

while she was birthing children.

You’d have to split stone, of course, to read

the true motivations behind

her acronyms, shave granite

or pyrite to reach the history

that cannot speak for itself. 

She would have buried it in concrete

had it been her choice, where to live,

what comes back, whether by

practice or raw instinct, the number

of possibilities: There are only so

many according to the Greeks

and Latin speakers, 

like they said in a movie she dismissed

as unoriginal, but she could never

escape from the facts.

They lived in her gut: we know

that now. We are far more

sympathetic. You can always

blame the victim until the science

comes out. Then it’s too late

to rehabilitate the specimen.

The Birth(s) of Medusa

She was born in the bedroom

in the old house in Kingston

where her parents had retreated

into the family bosom

as prosperity loitered

in alleys and gutters.

The river was rising and a fissure

in the old woman’s heart

could have presaged disaster,

the flooding of the womb

or the lack of attention paid

to the future; that’s how my father

put it, about her teeth,

her ankles, the pieces

worn down before the dawn

was held back, before it was

captured: that’s what my uncle

said, and he loved her.

But if life was rushing at you

at a pace before atomics, crashing 

burning, boring sinkholes at depths

impossible to calculate during

the Nixon and Eisenhower administrations,

how would you have held up.

Would you have had an unnatural

attraction to oil exploration?

To locomotives, and anything that

could move on flat surfaces

and girded foundations, what

could be counted on before

disappearing like a country

beckoned by promises

of convenience. 

Before she died, she had

to ask me which years

had been forfeited by her

manias, blackened like maps

the enemy might pick up

and try to hold to the light

for clues, as if a mother

searching through twilight

sleep, the pre-birth amnesia,

a curse that guaranteed

all she would be left with

were landlocked pieces.

Medusa’s Crime and Punishment

Birth and