Consider the Basilisk: his stare that withers movies
at the title cards, that stops all traffic lights at yellow,
and erodes the words right off the page so he never
finishes Gone Girl or an article in The New Yorker. How tiresome
it must be to land back at the beginning,
just as the action is ramping up, when we first see
the heroine walking down a city street, goggle-eyed at the skyscrapers.
Of course, remarks the Basilisk, preening his feathers,
everything from here is mapped out anyway:
the meet-cute, the conflict, the climax and denouement,
with an inescapable pop song!—I don’t even need to watch it
to know what happens.
Onscreen, the Girl appears, as the Girl is required to be:
slender, big eyes full of hopeful humor.
And here comes the Guy, handsome and ciphered.
And the Best Friend, sidekicking her way
through yet another routine that isn’t hers. I eat popcorn
and slip into a salt coma, and the Basilisk curls his tail around himself
like a cat. That Girl is really a woman, he muses,
wearing a girl-face, acceptable and blithe.
If I removed the mask, what do you suppose you would see?
The Basilisk plucks popcorn from my bucket
with delicate claws. Can you get the cheese seasoning next time?
The screen and the film are both heating up under his glance,
growing fuzzy at the edges, as the Girl
encounters some trouble she’ll resolve
with pluck and innate charm. The soundtrack protests and screeches,
or is it the uncomplicated joy of the Girl,
running through an airport? I finger my own girl-face
where the seams have begun to go ragged.
My greasy fingers, my chapped lips.
This is what you think of women’s lives, the Basilisk hisses.
This is what the softness of women earns them.
He slithers out then, to go observe birds out of the sky
and blast billboards. The film jumps the burned spot
and stutters back to life. The Girl continues
on her track toward the Guy and destiny,
and I am alone again in the low-light,
shadow and vision caressing those smooth cheeks.
Under the velvet, stuck deep in the plush
pleasure of looking and looking:
abnegation: what we desire is dissolved in our gaze.
A sluggish river, an attar of roses
the dumbness of the hungry, the potent ire of the eaten.
I gather my purse and my empty cup and I go back
out into daylight, fumbling for my missing mask.
What happened to it?
Is it crumpled in a pocket with the ticket stub,
is it fluttering down the street? And what about the Girl?
I think I know her. I think I consumed her.
The anger of women, with very little prompting,
could burn down the world.
–
Jeanne Obbard received a bachelor’s degree in feminist and gender studies from Bryn Mawr College, and works in clinical trial management. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from Vinyl, The Moth, and Copper Nickel, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards. She is a poetry reader for Drunk Monkeys. Follow her on Twitter @jeanneobbard.