"I Was the More" by Martha Gray Adkins

Martha Gray Adkins was born in St. Louis, MO, and has lived at Egleston Children’s Hospital, Fort Benning, Fort Ord, and Fort Drum. Adkins’s work has appeared in Feminine Inquiry and Lavender Review, and is forthcoming in Plenitude.


“I Was the More” is based on my experience as a survivor of intimate partner violence. This poem is part of an ongoing body of trauma-oriented autobiographical work re-interrogating the domestic, where each piece uses fragmented text from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (in this case, Ophelia’s line “I was the more deceived”) as title and kindling.