Don’t be Aphrodite. Be Athena
By Megan Laack
how did i get here?
naked and standing on a shell
please.
i was in Love crazy, stupid-
Love
so when my boyfriend asked me to pose for him
i thought? whats the harm its not like anyone will see
and here i am hanging in the Uffizi
for all the tourists and complaining
children to see
and whats worse is he painted my hair
*longer*
just like he always wanted me to do
just like HER hair
my friends warned me
but what do they know? their love lives are worse than mine
hes a dirty liar. not once did he buy me flowers
and yet he shows me showered in them
disgraced
humiliated
haunted
by him and the women he hid from me
frozen in paint and canvas
for all of eternity
I chose the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli because I was enamored by the painting when I saw it for the first time. What struck me- and what I referenced in the poem was the amount of people that were gathered around it that did not seem to understand or care. They took their pictures and moved on. In a way I wrote the poem in the way that Not My Best Side was written: from the point of view of the subject in the painting. However, I chose to focus on the point of view of Venus. I decided to show how many women are so vulnerable and giving when they are in love just to be stabbed in the back. I went completely off script of how the painting “should be” interpreted because I felt that the art itself looked very symbolic of how modern relationships play out. I used breaks in the poem to separate ideas and thoughts. Telling a complete story in the way that stories unfold in real life. In pieces, pieces that individually are not tremendous- but when put together- they mean a great deal.