Cry of the Stars

I. Princess In The Tower

You stand in the wings again, squinting.
It is not stage-light brilliance that blinds you
but the flash of her teeth,
and her quick glance your way as she flickers
across a wooden floor.
Here, in the wings, you could
open your mouth, you could open your arms,
you could open everything that is locked
behind your ribs and fidgeting
inside your stomach and poised
across your knuckles but
the one thing you cannot open

        Autumn in the bogs,
        wet feathered reeds
        bruised and yellow beneath
        cold stumbling fog.
        “Ho! Wanderer!”
        spoke the king.
        “I know what you need.
        Step here, fear not—
        the surface
        will hold.

        “Come, my daughter:
        You are mine. Make no
        mistake. Come,
        we will dine
        on jeweled snakes
        and frogs
        of gold.”

the curtain like a guillotine must drop
mercilessly to the wooden floor,
the curtain that walls you off
from your dreaming,
the curtain bending against
the sun at your bedroom window.

 
II. Lament

        Lo-Ruhamah, Lo-Ammi:
        Lama, lama sabachthani?

The girls in the dressing room sit side-by-side,
the last two left after midnight fled the blitzkrieg
of flurried kisses and rose trophies,
and the whitewashed cinder-block walls
let out a last sigh into the stillness.
Sophie closes her eyes, holds out her hand,
drops her pearl earrings, feels Madalena reach over,
smiles, looks at herself in the streaked mirror
ringed with harsh white lights, realizes
she’s alone, cannot find the earrings again,
spends the rest of the night
staring at her fingers.


III. Birth Of The Betrothed

That lagoon and its lavender houses at dusk,
soft gold light mirrored over the shoreline. We are
beyond it almost before we realize—probably
Tatiana is driving too fast—so you and I slip back later
to dangle our ankles in the water.
Who are you? I ask. Three years ago
you were the kindred soul I never thought I’d lose,
but who have you become?
Are you my brother? My father?
Answer me!

Hoshea the king of clean city streets
did not hesitate, splashed straight down into mud and
had his Oxfords swallowed off his feet;
the grass stank from its own rotting and
stuck to his cheeks, and he just kept going.
They say he climbed back out the other side
days later, holding a baby girl,
his tailored outfit good as new
and not a whiff of the swamp on him.
“A baby girl?”
        Maybe his wife, actually.
“Or his wife! Which is it?”
        Look, if I had all the details I wouldn’t be telling
        this story, would I?


IV. You Follow Me

                 if you saw him

The ocean’s pulse is endless here, Poseidon’s bitter wrath
relentless, thrashing at the stubborn sand—and I,
transfixed between—

                standing there, holding out his arms

Foolish daughter, who stole you from me?
Who gave you legs and set you on the land?

                standing there to welcome you to shore

You who were brought forth in iniquity,
your skin is new, soft, not meant
for stones and grass that cut like knives.
Now the saltwater at your ankles—ha!
I see it stings. I see you shrink from me.

                    you would wade
                    you would wade

You will not pass through unharmed. No daughter of mine

                    not only through a sea of wrongs,
                    but through hell itself

Who are you? I do not know you. No daughter of mine

                    if you saw him
                    you would wade

Out on Tiberias we threw our nets
    into dark waves, which crested with a whisper,
splashed cold starlight on our hands, and broke
    the image of the moon cast on the sea.

I had paused in the corridor, faltering
in my crystal shoes, my gut flipping with
a cold sense of unbelonging.
The floor was lucent gold and smoother
than my young nephew’s infant cheek,
and I, whose soot-stained kneecaps creaked
with age and smudged black even
the dark, tired stones in my father’s old house,
what was I doing here?

(I dreamed of this once, long ago—
when one stepsister had first kissed her count
and the other was laughing with her duke,
I thought of the prince, yet unmarried,
and a silent dance sparkling like
stars at midnight—but he
weathered the decades alone, and
so did I.)

Again, before I turned on the curve
of the staircase, I hesitated.
My bare hand on the ivory railing trembled,
crudely wrinkled leather against
the polished white, knuckles scraped and raw
from the years’ washing.

(No gloves, she said.
I want them all to see your hands, your
scars, your callouses: this is
the honor you have earned.
She saw my girlish look, shy
beneath the creases on my weary face,
and laughed, kindly.
As for your beauty tonight, she said, beauty
is always a gift.)

The wide window, then, reached out
to me, when the blaze of chandeliers
and braziers had thrown itself into the glass and
hauled out the image of myself
breathtaking, like I had never seen,

my hair bound up in a silver crown
of moonlight, shoulders pulled back
and standing tall, free from work at last,
a long gown of silk with its deep blue
slippery beneath the roughness of my fingertips.

When I looked down at the people,
the room grew thick with a hush.
I lifted my head and found the king, rising
from his throne, and there his eyes
caught me, somehow ancient and somehow new;

he came to me through the parting crowd
and took my weathered hands in his,
warm and strong and silent—
(I thought of you
once, I said.)
—a smile split the lines on his face, and he
bowed with creaking spine, and asked
me to dance.


--
Other Princess Poems:
Snow White
Rapunzel
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Sleeping Beauty

Just now, I bent to pick a flower;
your absence had hollowed me so thoroughly
my fingers snapped like straws.

I don’t know why you left,
why you slowly, suddenly, like a freezing
river cleaved our home in two,

I don’t—I don’t know why
or when you became who you became.
Your eyes like frosted glass

winking at the world,
your jokes like icicles thrust in my back, as if
I didn’t hear every word.

Do you remember? I think
you cannot:

In the last summer of our childhood
we pressed a rose. Its petals folded
into arches and windows
more intricate than a cathedral, tucked
safe in the heart of our favorite book

and when winter came and we
had opened it before the fire, those dry
petals looked out at us, the face
of something older than innocence

but you wrinkled your nose
and laughed. What a laugh!
It cut me open, harsh
like the northeastern wind
that grinds at the corners of our house,

all bitterness, no mirth.
Like a dead rat, you said.
You didn’t notice me bleeding.

A crow with your mother’s frown
showed me a vision of you: the cold ground
had shattered on your shoulders

and you heaved the pieces
across a colorless floor while she watched
smirking from her throne.

My clever boy, she said,
my clever darling, stay with me
forever.

You sighed tearlessly
and kept working, as if you could craft
eternity from broken earth.

Nothing here is real.
Do not be alarmed at the way
these thorns make you bleed, and
the mossy earth gapes at your feet,
and the sky seems almost
too heavy, low enough for your scalp
to scrape itself against.
Nothing is real.

I am asleep, and I
have made everything up.
Any moment now, those stones
beneath you may turn to water,
or sand, or cotton candy, or
anything I imagine, but keep
walking. I would
like to meet you.
I am asleep, and I am
making everything up.

My brain has sprouted wires
like long hair,
and my dreams drain out from
my skull like kitchen sinks
and old batteries. They have
been observing my world
from the outside for what
must be centuries, and
I do not know how you
found your way in. Already
I can hear your footsteps through
the long wires, twisting up,
backwards, back
into my brain.

Come and wake me up.
I have changed the thorns to
daisies, and a sun is rising
in the distant north.
Climb the old stone steps until
you find me sleeping here,
and see my face in the cold
green light of blinking screens,
my head a mass of dark
tangled cables. Unplug them.
Come unplug them, and
wake me up.


--
Other Princess Poems:
Snow White
Rapunzel
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Cinderella

I have a single memory of
my father’s face. I could tell it to you
for hours—the red-blue currents
of love and grief that swirled
in his vast violet eyes
as he lifted my tiny indigo body from
my mother’s crimson corpse, the
tender smile that briefly shattered the lines
on his skin, before I closed my eyelids
and never opened them again,
though the rest of me grew strong
and healthy as the years went by.

The townsfolk would crow at my story
if they heard it, or cross
the cobblestones from me
in some pretense of superstition, but
my father understands.
He knows that I can see
what others cannot,
that even with ordinary eyes
I would not have cared for appearance
when there is so much behind
the ribcage to explore:

the deadened brown of his merchant’s
cares, the dark gray of his wife’s memory,
the shock of vibrant roses he tends here
for his three daughters;
the pearly expanse of one sister’s
innocence and the sour yellow of the other’s
wounded heart, and the lovely silver
glimmering deep inside them both.
The rainbow mosaic of the passing
townspeople, their souls pulsing
in a hundred hues.

You were a tempest of autumn color
and a storm of fiery incandescence
when I met you, a sunset of a man
bold and bright enough to take
my breath away.
I knew of your monstrous teeth and
grotesque features, frightening for
any normal pair of eyes, but it
hardly mattered

when your wine-red spirit
burned, and danced like that.
Is it any wonder I could not bear
to leave your side, once
I had known you? Is it
any wonder I loved you?
My sisters call you handsome now,
but even they know nothing of
the brilliant flames you hold within.
I would not trade
the sight of them
for anything.


--
Other Princess Poems:
Snow White
Rapunzel
The Little Mermaid
Sleeping Beauty
Cinderella

This web of scars on my face,
crawling down my neck in ribbons
and screaming over my shoulders,
was like the shadow of a shark, or
a reef of rotting coral
when I first came home:
my father hid his face and fled,
while my sisters shrank away
one by one, and the whole
kingdom grew silent in horror.

I kept the story to myself,
since nobody would listen.
The way the knots buried themselves
in my flesh, and the ropes ground the scales
from my skin, and the wooden boat
drove splinters through the canvas
of my back, and the humans
shouted in anger, while
water and fire fell from the sky
like whalebone spears and diving pelicans.
The three days of agony spent
choking on wet air, hungry,
bound up in rough nets that
tightened and grew colder every hour.

They came by at night, every one of them,
with fire in their hands, cursing at me
in their harsh language and
throwing broken glass at me
until I bled like the neverending rain, and it
pooled strangely beneath me—

all except for him.
He sat by me sometimes,
singing something that sounded strong
and steady, like the great currents
sweeping southward or
the salmon heading north
in spring. His hair was the color
of sand, shining silver in the moonlight
as he picked up the glass shards
around me, ignoring the cuts
they left on his palms.

When he dragged me from the dark
and opened his fishing knife,
gleaming wicked as an orca’s jaw,
I thought his kindness had run out, but
he only sliced the ropes and
hauled me over the side
with a salt-crusted kiss to my forehead.
I could hear the slightest bit of song
behind me as I swam away.

He arrived years later with
a tail and gills and a smile,
when my family had learned
to love me again, and the people had
grown used to a princess who
was less than beautiful.
He would not speak, or sing, but
held my face in his mangled hands,
where my long-healed scars, meeting his,
burned again for a moment,

Aunt Scallion said I could call her
anything I wanted, as long as it wasn't
'Witch,' or 'Mother,' so since
she named me after salad,
I figured it was only fair.
On good days, I’ll call her Callie,
but when it’s “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
keep drawing those free-body diagrams!”—
Well. On those days she will not
forget her onion-rooted identity.

You are under some delusion, I think,
that I am locked here in distress,
that I long for sun and sea and stars
and most importantly, love,
and your love specifically, whatever
that means to you.
I am not distressed;
I am undergoing education,
and by my calculations I will be done
in less than six months, actually.

Aunt Callie and I have been
working on this project for years.
Soon our pulley system
will be sophisticated enough
for me to lower myself from the window
unaided, using only
my hair. Isn’t that exciting?
Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait
until then if you want to try it.

I don’t have the time to recalibrate
for your height and weight,
but I’m sure I could keep
yelling down to you like this
on break hours,
if that’s what you want.

Aunt Callie says to tell you
that I am Samson and you are very
close to being my Delilah,
which I think is a terrible analogy.
She’s not old, but she’s
kind of getting there.

There are stairs round the back,
if you’d like to come solve equations
with me. It’s dreadfully boring
sometimes, which is why I’ve
taken to singing the quadratic formula
whenever it shows up.
That must have been what you heard.

Aunt Callie says you’re welcome
to come up, if you can get past
that bit of overgrown hedge. We’re not
the best gardeners, pardon us.
She is making onion soup with rampion,
which I think is supposed to be funny
and really isn’t, but if you’re determined
enough, you can find out
what you think of it yourself.


--
Other Princess Poems:
Snow White
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Sleeping Beauty

This is what they tell you:
I was a baby with pearl skin, black jade
hair, and a crying mouth
wet and red like ripe apples
in the early morning mists,
the king's daughter once, they will murmur,
still lovely if she had lived—
before they show you the greater treasure
of the emperor's little boy,
his tiny porcelain face a perfect mirror of
his mother's splendid beauty.

Nobody understood why
I did what I did.
The gods themselves could see
I loved him like a son, and how I loved
the fragile walls of our home that
trembled in the autumn wind, the fragrant cherry
blossoms that dangled from the curving rooftops
and blanketed the courtyard in the spring.
(How I honored my father excellently,
how I respected his wife as if she had
borne me in her own womb.)

Because they did not know,
they will not tell you of my brother's
first words and how they spoke
my death. Not ba-ba, not ma-ma, but
my own cursed name—and oh,
at that moment my mother's fingernails
began to grow, into the wicked
teeth of a jeweled comb biting at my neck, and
the fraying of my collar's fastening
that twisted in too tightly,
and cold knives to peel sweet apples for
bribing his little tongue,
and all the while he cried and cried
and cried for me.

How glad they were to lose me!
I ran up and up, as far as I could,
while my little brother fell silent at last.
She would have another, I told
myself. She would
have another.

Now the hot sun has painted my skin
with mud, and the mountains have kissed
my hair with snow, and my wrinkled mouth is
the muddled color of dusk.
You may find me here, sitting by
the ricefields when the sun is setting, but
only if you hasten: my time is slipping
like the moon wanes into darkness.

My seven sons have no sister
to cry to. They bring me oranges from
the lowlands and green jade
from the caves nearby,
smiling like their father
and nothing at all like me.



--
Other Princess Poems:
Rapunzel
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Sleeping Beauty
Cinderella