Medusa

by Joe Weintraub

No, she didn’t have serpents coiled like curls
in her hair, that hissed and twirled like whorls
of spitting venom, nor eyes of bloody red,
emitting poisonous shafts of spectral light;
but when she twisted to look my way, her head
seemed disembodied, held aloft and tight
in an iron grip; and I understood then
she knew what we’d lost, what I had become,
and I knew that from then on never again
would we live our lives together as one,
that our home was now but a sterile terrain,
that a glance had turned our love into stone.

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Joe Weintraub’s fiction, essays, translations, and poetry have appeared in literary reviews and periodicals, from The Massachusetts Review to New Criterion. His short plays have been produced throughout the United States and internationally. In 2021, his translation of Lombardi’s The Gypsy Spiders and Other Tales of Italian Horror was published by Tartarus Press (UK). His speculative fiction, A Visit to the Catacombs: Tales of the Dark and the Unknown, was published by Dark Owl Press in Winter 2025. In 2018, his annotated translation of Eugène Briffault’s Paris à table: 1846 was published by Oxford UP. More at https://jweintraub.weebly.com/