Supernatural Fairy Tales

Posted: 05 Jan 2011 06:41 AM PST

I
Somewhere Jimmy Crack Corn is King James of the Stalks, on his little head
a copper crown with a single emerald. He peels
a husk on his throne of straw and damns scarecrows
to underground basements to eternally
find needles in haystacks and weave them into Rapunzel's long braid.

II
What about my life, Appleseed?
Send me the shoes to walk through your
windless lined orchard, disorganized as your
stick-slung pack.
From my desk,
from a rolling chair,
I split an apple right down the middle.
That gas invisibly filled the orbit
with wavy lines. It smelled like your hair
when we danced barefooted,
bodies pressed as I never saw you again
and had your impression on me
ever after.

III
How do short girls
observe their standing partner? I can't be
taken seriously, the one who dreamed them, between
kissing and leaning firmly the defined hip bones like
the ends of a book. Unless leaning against
a brick wall or immaculate
feathered pillow I perform
quite sloppily - after all, the tall ones
have seen my scalp and I haven't.
Does my hair grow straw-like and course from
dandruffed origins? Or smooth like it was spun
by the miller's daughter in Rumplestiltskin's kingdom?
I dreamed it was golden. I dreamed you knew.

Charlotte Beard is a writer and clinician working in the Bay Area. Her previous work has been published in New Forum, the Undergraduate Creative Writing Journal at UC Irvine, Dark Lady Poetry, and the Meadowland Review. Her poetry is generally whimsical and based on the concept of the self and the other.

Charlotte's Blog: http://robotsmasquerading.blogspot.com/

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