Most people know the feeling of smiling politely while something far less polite churns underneath. Mary F. C. Pratt's "Persona" turns that feeling into a small drama. The title is the Latin word for the mask an actor wore on stage, and the speaker has one that is "cheerful," "placid, unremarkable." Behind it lives Kali, the Hindu goddess of fearsome, destructive power, here "festooned with screaming skulls." The poem's central idea is the gap between the self a woman shows the world and the fury she keeps locked away, and the effort it takes to keep the two apart.
The poem builds this gap through two opposing vocabularies. The public self is described in small, soft, deflating words: "small pink lips," "polyester shirt," "one beige hand." Even the speaker's mouth shrinks into a "small polite mouth hole," a phrase that strips away everything human about it and leaves a mere opening for coffee to pass through. Kali's side is loud and physical. She would "throttle," "fling," "split through / my skin, bite heads and crunch down bones." These verbs are blunt and mostly one syllable, so the line itself seems to crunch. The word "matron" tells us what the mask is made of: respectability and middle-aged invisibility. The speaker is a woman nobody would expect to be dangerous.
The line breaks do a lot of the work. "Small pink lips but Kali" ends the first stanza on the goddess's name, and the sentence then spills over: "of the bloody tongue." Kali breaks into the poem just as she threatens to break into the speaker's life. Later, "She" is stranded at the end of a line, after "that man sipping his tea," and the next line launches into the fantasy of the goddess leaping onto the counter. The details of counter, saucers and cups suggest, though the poem never says so, that the speaker is in a café or shop, which makes the imagined destruction more comic and more shocking. The man with his tea is wonderfully ordinary. The poem has no rhyme and no steady meter. Its rhythm comes from accumulation, as in "break the door, smash the steps, / dance her pounding dance / down the crackling road," where the clauses pile up and the violence gains momentum. Then comes the single word "Meantime," which drops us back into the stillness of the cup in the hand.
That stillness is where the poem's tension lives. Nothing actually happens. The speaker drinks her coffee, and the entire rampage exists only as something that "might" or "may" occur. Yet the rage seeps out in one small, unsettling detail: "Some days the coffee / tastes like blood." The image connects the polite mouth to Kali's "bloody tongue" from the opening, so the goddess is already inside the body and tasting through it. The mask holds, but it is not airtight.
The ending shifts the pronoun. Until now the speaker has said "I" and "she," keeping herself and Kali at arm's length. In the last stanza she says "Our shriek," and the two figures join. The final image, a shriek that "could shatter / all the glasses in this town," also brings the poem full circle. Glasses are as fragile and domestic as the cups and saucers Kali wanted to fling, but now the damage reaches a whole town rather than one man at one table. The short, spare lines of this stanza read like a held breath, and "could" keeps the power in reserve.
The poem is significant for how it uses its borrowed goddess. Kali is not explored as a religious figure here. Judging by the imagery, she serves as a vivid emblem of anger that has no acceptable outlet, which gives the speaker's suppressed rage a scale and dignity that ordinary words like "irritation" never could. The poem is also funny, and the humor makes it more convincing. A reader laughs at the skulls erupting from a polyester shirt, then notices how tightly the speaker is holding the cup. In the end the poem is itself a kind of controlled shriek, and the mask has just enough room in it for us to hear.