Snow Angel
Illustration by Marina Mika
We know you only by your absence.
The hole left behind, pressed
through the drifts like something
fallen from a great distance.
Wings shorter than...
The Little Mermaid Warns You, You May Have Already Become Forgotten
Painting by Anne Bachelier
Your once-silken voice will desert you, your legs
will make every step on land a torture.
There will come a time when you...
Lady In The Meads
My feet leap in the world of Faerie
My body dances in my sacred grove.
In my eyes, you see something wild –
something you cannot tame...
Self-Portrait As Mythological Creature
I tore off my skin in the moonlight and became a seal, sleek
and noisy. One day a man put his arms around me, and
my...
In Which I Decide to Grow Wings
because I can no longer feel my feet.
Was it a trick of genetics or a magic potion
that made my fingers into feathers or fins
ready...
The One-Armed Swan Sister
I find it is much harder to sew
now that one of my arms has become
a giant white wing. It’s nonsense
to assume, of course, a...
Simbelmynë
Photography by Paul Barson
Even here the glimmering simbelmynë grows
in the ghostly pale green meads and haunted hollows
far from the hallows somber in their ordered...
Making Witch Bottles With My Mother
A midwife—she reaches
for the flower’s afterlife and dyes
it with a puddle of St. Germain. We’re dealing
in floral ghosts & flakes of paint
curved over our...
Selkie
It’s not that I’m not comfortable
in my own skin. It’s that I can’t
ever be without it—it’s a harness
in a handbag, holding me to the...
Dwarf-Crested Irises in Canaan, West Virginia
The realist masters have avoided
the Appalachians and I have to assume
that this is because fayeland is difficult
to paint. What to do with...