My Therapist Asks Me To Explain Why I Re-write Fairy Tales
The wood-and-plastic fort
in my backyard doesn’t exist
anymore. No child will ever climb
to the platform where I took off
my pants. No one will play
truth or dare where I rinsed
sweat away with a sandcastle mold
full of hose water. Back then,
scientists hadn’t dreamed up
plant-based heme iron – I ate
buns with ketchup and cheddar cheese
all summer, unable to stomach meat.
Even now, if I concentrate I can gum
the roof of my mouth with memories
of salt and bread.
It was then, I tell my husband, I developed this pain,
phantom fingers that fill me with rocks
carefully selected from the playground gravel
and cleaned with spit before Neighbor Girl
placed each one inside me, called it a game.
When I was a child I learned my name
meant blooming thing. Each year I plant
a garden of myself – figs full of wasps, peppers
too hot to eat, tubers with purple flowers
to mark their resting place. At night my garden
grows fruit marked with black speck and blight
while I dream of wolf-faced lovers in red cloaks
with kisses that taste of grandmother’s liver.
No pool of growing green has baptized
the blood from my history.
But I was telling you
about the fort, Neighbor Girl, places
I was made to touch, to kiss, to piss
on my Barbie dolls for which my parents kept
me inside for a week. I told Neighbor Girl
they locked me in the basement, fed me only meat.
Neighbor Girl is a mother now.
Should I worry? Everything cycles,
hurt piled on fledgling hurt
like my panties hidden in the bottom of the trash.
Neighbor Girl’s daughter celebrates her birthday
with a princess party. She wears the same
cotton mock-ups I used to wear:
Belle’s ball gown, Cinderella’s upcycled rags.
I’d like to think there’s a picture of me in such a dress,
unaware of my body and all the ways it can feel.
