
Jessica Norman
Sylvia, Assia.
Updated: Feb 24, 2021
A dance in life A dance in death:
six years apart
They share one heart
And a gas oven.
Assia: his mistress
While Sylvia was alive;
Sylvia his mistress
After she had died:
A triple homicide.
Lifetime violence revisited on Sylvia’s grave,
Where he fought with the vandals
Who chiseled at his name,
Leaving only Plath intact and whole -
But he had control
Her last editor - he edited her -
The inferior poet
Burnt her words:
The greater act of vandalism.
Sylvia liked the bees
Their matriarchy
Free
Protected by stings
From the sea witches
And Assia’s feral beauty;
He fucked her
Like a butcher
In Sylvia’s bed
While his family
Avoided her eye
When she died
No headlines, instead,
The strangling of a wife,
And a girl in Paris
who set herself on fire
Made the papers.
Assia was fire
But no animal
Not a demon or crow -
Just a woman
In love with indecision
And the promise of happiness.
In love with her jailer
Who told her when to rise
And eat and sleep and clean
Who expected
her sacrifice at his altar
He left her
A literary footnote
And after her dream went kaput,
As she slipped away in the kitchen
With Shura -
Was it Ted
Or Sylvia she dreamed of?
