Second prize poetry winner of the Hart House Literary Contest in 2020 was Victoria Mbabazi, a UTSC graduate currently living in Brooklyn, New York.
This is what the judges – poets Prathna Lor, Kate Cayley and Ingrid Ruthig – said about Mbabazi’s poem:
“‘Medusa Smile’ is a love poem that upends the love poem. Deftly negotiating tricky and very familiar territory with an impressive, tongue-in-cheek command of romantic cliché, the poem manages to combine erotic frankness, genuine pain, surprising wit and deep feeling.”
Medusa Smile
by Victoria Mbabazi
I’d hoped she’d fall in love
in my cleavage or
at the curve of my hips
I’ve been told that’s
how it happens you
fall in love fucking
that is when the choir
rises and the credits
roll happily ever
whatever the fuck
I don’t fall in love I
fall in anxiety I
crash watching her
make mac and cheese
wondering what key
the echo in the back
of my mind is in
what makes me feel like
I’m dying when
she looks at me like
my heart is in her
teeth knowing I’ll
bleed out happily
altogether I can’t
be still for a girl
that isn’t mine and
yet she looked at me
wolf in love’s clothing
like I was all hers God
I believed her too
Hart House Literary and Library 