Snow White Slant

Enter the huntsman in green,
mercenary greed-glint, dagger blink.
Snow White pants at his side
on the edge of gloaming woods.
He pull-pushes the blade
into beauty’s flesh, exits left.

Seven forest creatures face her
on a favourite path. Infatuated, baffled
they squeeze her into their crypt,
plant jewels upon her eyes,
and wreaths of wild flowers where birds rest.

The Queen twitches before the mirror,
brandishes her wand, witnesses her foe
more beautiful than ever,
immured in stone and alabaster pallor.

She is the fairest of them all. Her legs give way
as silk swishes to earth, felled by a mind-axe,
Frogs croak into princes, deer into the innocent.
Bears roar into songbirds.

The huntsman lives beyond human touch,
a hermit, gold forgotten.
No kiss to wake Snow White,
perfect beyond real life.

Maggie Mackay, a Scot with wanderlust, a love of jazz and a good malt, has published in All Write Then’s anthology Still Me…, winner of the Writers’ Circle Anthology Award 2014, and has work in various publications, Open Mouse, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Bare Fiction, The Interpreter’s House ,Obsessed with Pipework and The Lake, with work forthcoming in The Screech Owl. She is at Manchester Metropolitan University taking an MA in Poetry, and is a co-editor of Word Bohemia.