Olympia

The whole story is very simple:
His fussing and furtive fannying
Fucked
Me
Off.
So I stopped listening. Simply.
To his wheedling directions.
To his vision and his ideas.

The whole story is very simple:
I told him to
Tais-toi!
Shut up!
And listen to me for a change.
(He forgot I too have vision
and a brain not housed in the
alabaster mounds of my breast).
The ribbon, which he meant for my hair
I wound around my neck
So it looked like I sold my sex.
My left hand covered my lack
My shame
My most-coveted possession

– I could have named my price for him! –

I slipped one slipper back on
and I was at once Cinderella:
Princess and Servant;

Virgin and Whore.

Laure, dearest friend
laughed a honeyed laugh
and held the basket aloft.
Olympe, la petite chatte, arched
her elastic spine and yowled.

The whole story is very simple:
I looked at him
and I told him to paint.
He did.
With every brush of horse-hair on canvas
I uttered a curse:
for every leering look
for every slavering jaw
of every wolf-like maw
of every grey haired, grey-pubed
short-sighted, flat-dicked,
heaving, sweating, red-faced,
fat-fingered perv
that buys a woman every Friday
on the corner of la Place Pigalle,
and throws her away

– seven minutes later –

filled with bastard children or the pox.

Every

single

thrusting,

clawing,

pawing,

raking,

raping,

gobbling,

gulping,

inhaling,

ingurgitating,

feeder,

eater,

consumer.

The whole story is very simple:
for an hour or so, I was that Fury,
the one that Hell hath none like.
To this day I do not know what
came over me.
Or over him.
He painted with a vengeance:
He worked as if my gaze
(reflected like sunlight in a looking glass)
seared him and scorched him to a frenzy,
a passionate madness,
like a man possessed
he painted.
I sat.
Laure stood.
(We both stared).
Olympe, the cat, slept on, not stirring
until he finished with a satisfied sigh.
He thanked us three

– us witches!

us crones! –

profusely, and told us we could go.

As a final blow
(I was getting off on crushing his ego)
I took the courtesan’s orchid from my hair
and, yawning, said:
‘Name it after the cat for all I care.’

Art by Jade Fagersten