The Weak Spot, Susan Jewell

Blame the Greeks: Had the mother of Achilles just let go, dropping her son into the River Styx, would we even know

another’s frailties, the weak spots we use to rout out breaking points, like we did in our last tiff, the one about

nothing, when we poked at each others’ susceptible sore until the hard shell of raw ego broke like a metaphor—

opened and separated, the damage was done. In the River of Hate, when Thetis gripped her son,

how could she have known that having no mercy we’ll prick each vulnerability, willfully aiming for the heel?

SUSAN CARROLL JEWELL is a regular at the Second Wednesday Poetry Open Mic in Schenectady, New York. She loves everything about ekphrasis, including its ancient Greek origins. Her poem, “The Weak Spot,” began without rhyme—and was initially three times the length it is now. “The beginning and end,” she says, “are similar in both versions, but the entire middle was revised. The original idea was a quarrel about the structural integrity of a chicken’s eggshell, that its innate strength is compromised only when pressure is applied to a small spot. I removed the details and dramatic escalation of the couple’s tiff because domestic arguments are often about nothing. How we strategize the battle is the stuff of Greek mythology.”