After Happily Ever After
by Isabella David McCaffrey
Eventually Princess
Has to grow up. Then what?
Either she bears his children, grows fat,
A double chin, skin tags,
Varicose veins like lines in blue cheese.
The catafalque of too-fragrant flesh
She must carry around,
Betting on his gratitude
A memory of once lustrous eyes,
Cheeks velvet as peonies, lips dipped
In blood, though she has learned
To dread scarlet, gushing as it did
Until she prayed to die,
Cut open like a melon
So he might have his princey,
But only another useless bint
Upon the lacy sheet, congeries of shes, condemned
By birth to play the princess again. Again.
Is it any wonder Stepmother
From her oriel window
Was made distraught by sight of that eternal
She in the pleasaunce with her gold ball:
Insensate, disordered, so unkind—
Who’s to say who the true villain is?
No wonder that Other lost her mind,
That basket of apples ripe at her feet.
Oh the mocking fountains—
A diuturnity of plashing tears.
Silver as that mirror she gazes into
Now. It would be well to be a witch,
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