An Elegy for the Pompeii Woman the Internet Wants to Fuck

by Darah Schillinger

I don’t have a TikTok but the videos still filter through

my socials like hot lint from the dryer, clinging

to my clean clothes, and it was through these lint traps

that I learned of you, Pompeii woman—

how at twenty-three you were buried

under rubble and ash only to become

a thing consumed, a body for the Internet to fuck.

Your body, if that is what we are to call a corpse on display,

lies on its stomach on my screen, stone arms covering

your face in a final human effort to protect yourself,

but it’s your body—the curve of your ass and the spread

of your legs—that made you go viral, not your fear.

I thought maybe it’s a joke maybe

in someone else’s life it’s funny

until a Twitter thread threw me down

a six-foot hole and told me why morgues prefer to hire women

(men like to fuck the bodies)

and how even in death we are made victims,

carcasses picked apart and stitched back together,

fleshlights made casket ready.

I knew then it was not a joke, it was not funny,

how they laughed at you, how they saw you lying face down

in a glass case and their first thought was how they could

take you and make you theirs

two thousand years after god took you first.

Because even before the Internet found your body

and made it food, someone chiselled you from the earth

and placed you on a glass platter, set you

on the table like a pig straight from the spit, and invited

the world to tuck in. Even in death we are packaged

grocery store samples, toothpicked for easy eating.

The knowledge of this clings to me like lint.