Magic Realism
The ugliness of the widow’s daughter
grows uglier when she scowls a pouty sulk
while her mother hovers in aching love
over her sprawl on a rumpled sofa
stained orange from spilled cheese puffs
pleading in a cooing whine for her to quit
jabbing and jiggling a controller at a big screen
that’s exploding staccato hatred throughout
the cottage and go out to make friends
with girls in wealthier village families.
But what’s this plain girl supposed to do
when a pretty girl is always scurrying about,
cheerfully scrubbing everything, wearing frocks
she threw out for hanging ugly on her but fit
cute as all get out on her? Even crescents
darkening her armpits signal a charming
get-up-and-go gumption. How can a mother
not share the anguish of her own blood
even as her darling kid defies earnest Mom’s
entreaties by growling, “Eat shit and die?”
To punish this cowbird stepdaughter
disguised as a dove for her cunning strategy
of sweet mindfulness despite every curse
and twisty pinch, the distraught stepmother
sends forth her offspring’s persecutor to spin flax
beside a scuzzy swimming pool where, swollen
and stinking, a drowned cat floats, wooing masses
of whispering iridescent flies. No one’s there to hear
her muttered curses when the spindle pricks
her fingers, and when she leans her gorgeous body
over opaque murk that only reflects darkness,
ostensibly to rescue, but probably to drown,
a bee struggling in that putrid water, in she falls
and sinks with the alacrity of a mob snitch
in cement shoes. But did that face, beautiful
like featureless network news beauties are thought
beautiful, drift down to rest next to a deflated seahorse
floatie and there, half-sunk in green scum, dissolve
to gray mush as our ergo hoc world would expect?
No, my friends. In fairy tales and astrophysics
the way down is the way up, for in that there,
a posited non-there, a timeless and infinite eternity
rules. Yes, this here’s a grim fairy tale from a book
banned for kids lest inappropriate yarns about women
being hammered into barrels spiked with nails
and rolled into rivers might trigger traumas in them,
though it’s more likely kids-today would turn aside
in boredom from bedtime reading to thumb
enemies into splatters on winking smart screens.
Nope, no drowning for this devious dish,
for up or down or sideways, she’s plopped
into an enchanted meadow where she rescues
talking bread from an oven and picks apples
for talking trees, knowing how easy networking
made well-known is the artless art of any deal
transacted in a strange town, how dealers
often provide first packets of smack for free.
Having wended her way to the quaint Tyrolean
gingerbread cottage of sorceress Mother Holle,
that beaver-toothed Hessian goddess of old
whose big magic trick is to make it snow
by shaking out featherbedding over the world,
our sly operator makes herself appear useful
while really sweet-talking warblers and bunnies
and various other rodents to do her work for her
while she lollygags about, munching cookie shards
snitched off siding on the old lady’s edible house
and gossiping with bright-hued butterflies,
who of course talk, but not in delightful harpsichord
tinkles but the Aspertine simper of receptionists
in Republican Congressional offices as they coo
“God bless you” from behind a fuck-you smirk.
Taken in by flattery and glistering good looks,
Mother Holle rewards her false flatterer
by drenching her in gold, for gold and princes
always loom large in the dreams of the poor,
before popping her back into the Real World.
No longer needing to feign humility, this born-again
flaunts her finery and fancy men at the mother
and her clinically depressed daughter, and so
what’s a despairing widow to do but drag
her child to the pool and throw her into its muck
where, despite a mother’s prayers, it isn’t given
for her own to fly to heaven, but instead
to thrash and choke in disgusting algae.
And worse, an infection from septic rot
in her face piercings kills her as punishment
for homeliness while her beautiful stepsister
marries a prince, who’d been the son of a President
who became King by taking the powers of Congress
and appointing judges with the help of peasants
and burghers angry over the magic having gone
from their lives, and since the new princess
had charter schools and Pilates academies named
after her, who’s to say she didn’t live happily
ever after since neuroscience and critical theory
have proven that all time is just once upon a time
and nothing is really real yet all is possible
except the freedom of the fated will?
grows uglier when she scowls a pouty sulk
while her mother hovers in aching love
over her sprawl on a rumpled sofa
stained orange from spilled cheese puffs
pleading in a cooing whine for her to quit
jabbing and jiggling a controller at a big screen
that’s exploding staccato hatred throughout
the cottage and go out to make friends
with girls in wealthier village families.
But what’s this plain girl supposed to do
when a pretty girl is always scurrying about,
cheerfully scrubbing everything, wearing frocks
she threw out for hanging ugly on her but fit
cute as all get out on her? Even crescents
darkening her armpits signal a charming
get-up-and-go gumption. How can a mother
not share the anguish of her own blood
even as her darling kid defies earnest Mom’s
entreaties by growling, “Eat shit and die?”
To punish this cowbird stepdaughter
disguised as a dove for her cunning strategy
of sweet mindfulness despite every curse
and twisty pinch, the distraught stepmother
sends forth her offspring’s persecutor to spin flax
beside a scuzzy swimming pool where, swollen
and stinking, a drowned cat floats, wooing masses
of whispering iridescent flies. No one’s there to hear
her muttered curses when the spindle pricks
her fingers, and when she leans her gorgeous body
over opaque murk that only reflects darkness,
ostensibly to rescue, but probably to drown,
a bee struggling in that putrid water, in she falls
and sinks with the alacrity of a mob snitch
in cement shoes. But did that face, beautiful
like featureless network news beauties are thought
beautiful, drift down to rest next to a deflated seahorse
floatie and there, half-sunk in green scum, dissolve
to gray mush as our ergo hoc world would expect?
No, my friends. In fairy tales and astrophysics
the way down is the way up, for in that there,
a posited non-there, a timeless and infinite eternity
rules. Yes, this here’s a grim fairy tale from a book
banned for kids lest inappropriate yarns about women
being hammered into barrels spiked with nails
and rolled into rivers might trigger traumas in them,
though it’s more likely kids-today would turn aside
in boredom from bedtime reading to thumb
enemies into splatters on winking smart screens.
Nope, no drowning for this devious dish,
for up or down or sideways, she’s plopped
into an enchanted meadow where she rescues
talking bread from an oven and picks apples
for talking trees, knowing how easy networking
made well-known is the artless art of any deal
transacted in a strange town, how dealers
often provide first packets of smack for free.
Having wended her way to the quaint Tyrolean
gingerbread cottage of sorceress Mother Holle,
that beaver-toothed Hessian goddess of old
whose big magic trick is to make it snow
by shaking out featherbedding over the world,
our sly operator makes herself appear useful
while really sweet-talking warblers and bunnies
and various other rodents to do her work for her
while she lollygags about, munching cookie shards
snitched off siding on the old lady’s edible house
and gossiping with bright-hued butterflies,
who of course talk, but not in delightful harpsichord
tinkles but the Aspertine simper of receptionists
in Republican Congressional offices as they coo
“God bless you” from behind a fuck-you smirk.
Taken in by flattery and glistering good looks,
Mother Holle rewards her false flatterer
by drenching her in gold, for gold and princes
always loom large in the dreams of the poor,
before popping her back into the Real World.
No longer needing to feign humility, this born-again
flaunts her finery and fancy men at the mother
and her clinically depressed daughter, and so
what’s a despairing widow to do but drag
her child to the pool and throw her into its muck
where, despite a mother’s prayers, it isn’t given
for her own to fly to heaven, but instead
to thrash and choke in disgusting algae.
And worse, an infection from septic rot
in her face piercings kills her as punishment
for homeliness while her beautiful stepsister
marries a prince, who’d been the son of a President
who became King by taking the powers of Congress
and appointing judges with the help of peasants
and burghers angry over the magic having gone
from their lives, and since the new princess
had charter schools and Pilates academies named
after her, who’s to say she didn’t live happily
ever after since neuroscience and critical theory
have proven that all time is just once upon a time
and nothing is really real yet all is possible
except the freedom of the fated will?
