Sometimes, I imagine Waterworld reshot
from the female gaze. Instead
of Kevin Costner’s gilled Mariner,
the story focuses on Helen, a hard
working woman trying to save up
enough money to get her and Enola
off this blighted atoll.
The Mariner is nothing
special: a conman who learns
Enola’s secret and barters it
away to pirates for a quick buck.
Then, when Enola is kidnapped,
he is the hired help, his loyalties
easily bought with Helen’s life savings.
Helen is the avenging angel,
the fierceness of her faith
and love, the dark blade that cuts
the Exxon Valdez open, spilling
its human guts onto the ocean waves
where they’re carried far away
into a watery sunset.
When the red tide recedes, the Mariner
is gone, jumped ship and fled
like the coward he is.
So Helen and Enola finish
their story the way they started it:
together in a world flooded
by man’s desire for control.
When they reach the Dryland,
they claim it not for themselves,
but in the name of every woman
whose story was stolen and co-opted,
their characters rewritten
for sex appeal and plot devices.
And they’re not alone.
In the trees and caves and hollows
of this new setting, women emerge
by the thousands, so many
the very land seems made
of their muscles and sinew,
their calluses and cellulite,
all of them glowing in the dark.