Final Girl?

Another quick poem to distract myself from writing this novel. Unpolished, imperfect but posting anyway. Because perhaps I don’t need to be perfect… I’m terrifying.

“You terrify me,” he says.
I pull back my lips
to check for fangs.

Am I monstrous?
Am I obscene?
Or do I see you
as you wish not to be seen?

You watch me carefully,
in black and white,
like a villager
with pitchfork ready.

Satin slips and trembling
screams. Horror films taught me
that fear should look beautiful.
That a woman’s role
was to be hunted elegantly.

But I have never been the girl
who trips on the staircase.
Never the girl waiting
for rescue to arrive
with a crucifix and square jaw.

No.
I am the thing at the top of the stairs.

The slow creak of a door
opening to a darkened room.
The silhouette in the attic window.
The telephone call
from inside the house.

You study me now
like men study mirrors
after midnight,
hoping not to catch movement
behind their own reflection.

Perhaps that is what unsettles you most:
not my teeth,
not my hunger,
not even the heat in my mouth
when I smile at you —

but that I look at you
the way wolves look at wounded things.

You were raised on stories
where beautiful men survive.
Where women bleed prettily
across velvet carpets.
Where the final girl is virtuous, untouched,
small enough to fit inside mercy.

But I was not made delicate.
I am lust and celluloid heat.
I was made in the flicker
of late-night television static,
stitched together from every woman
they buried beneath the narrative.

Bride of Frankenstein rage.
Carrie’s trembling fury.
The patient grin of a vampire
invited willingly across the threshold.

“You terrify me.” he says,
but this time it sounds reverent.
Like prayer.
Like surrender.