Article From 2014 Spring Issue #26
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Sing your song for us, mamma, they cry, sing your song, sing your song,
small white cheeks upon pillows, bright eyes blinking the black.
Tearless lovelies are mine, who know only sugarplums and ponies;
they beg night after night for the loss, the pain, their lives lack.
Henbane, I hum, the dark word a lump in my throat, hellebore,
until in the dark castle bedroom, behind stitched-shut eyelids,
the plants leaf and bloom in their old secret rows.
Nightshade, larkspur, I remember, rapunzel, oh rapunzel –
Night after night, I sing my name,
my heart a knot of grief and blood.
Mary McMyne’s chapbook of fairy tale poems, Wolf Skin, will be released this summer by Dancing Girl Press. Her fiction re-imagining myths and fairy tales has won the Faulkner Prize for a Novel-in- ©Alexander Kitsenko Progress and a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Visit her online at marymcmyne.com.
