what you said about me was always/about you

Like the stories of so many women, the story of Ursula takes two divergent paths.

In one, she’s a saint, a martyr, a warrior-maiden butchered alongside thousands of other warrior-maidens, a church built up on the foundation of their bones.

In another, she’s a sea-witch, a monster, a hideous creature born to turn others hideous: tongue-less, mangled, human.

But Saint Ursula was removed from the Roman liturgical calendar in 1969. There wasn’t enough evidence. The accounts varied. There was no way to separate fact from legend. Like so many women, Ursula became myth while men remained history.

I’ve long been fascinated by the way that women are othered, dichotomized, mythologized, silenced. Written into monsters. The middle (or bridge) section of my forthcoming collection KNOCK is my response, my (personal) reclamation of Ursula and her story. These poems wrestle with gender and the body: is it holy? Is it monstrous? A conduit to pain? A conduit to the voice? Can we ever truly inhabit our own stories? Can a story ever hold the truth? Are we the stories others tell of us or are we the stories we believe about others?

In the poem “Standing at dawn with my mother,” the speaker says:

& I’m sorry

but what you said about me was always

about you

When this poem was workshopped years ago, I remember how my professor paused, deep in thought. Yes, she said, exactly. Everything we say about anyone is only ever about ourselves.

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