Sleeping Beauty Makes Dinner
by Sally Rosen Kindred
I woke — cold kiss, that snow! — I married you. And now afternoon, I'm in your kitchen bending through the tender heat, tending what?—your black stove. Today you hunt: tonight you'll bring home venison. Someone here will baste the meat on a spit. I'm your Briar Rose, your Beauty: I'll do it, boil greens soft as flesh, spear them with a fork grief-keen as a spindle, pepper them with my sweat's pearls. I stir. Or did I ever wake? Would a princess be circling this pot, her hand scarred from sleep's glass thorns and feeling the push of the dark ladle through the broth, her hair rising to mist in its steam? I love this heat. Is that right? It's all too much like those years of stained glass sleep, when dreams finally named you: my hands moving over the spoons open and cold as your mouth and the sound of your horse beating back up the path, the whinny's blue scrape on the lips of the late, mistaken hour.
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of No Eden (Mayapple Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, Through the Gate, Linebreak, and The Moment of Change. Her chapbook of poems about Wendy Darling and Tinker Bell, Darling Hands, Darling Tongue, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press in spring 2013.
Her favorite fruit is the blueberry, because it's got that sudden, glassy taste of broken stars.
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