04 Saturday Jun 2016
Posted in flash fiction
Tags
fairy tale, fiction, flash fiction, K.M. Ross, Snow White, story
Happy-Ever-Afterwards
The queen sighed at her hands. “Not as milky white yet, still creamy and soft.” She gingerly caressed her body neath thick folds of scarlet brocade. “Alas, no longer girlish, but there’s more for my husband to embrace.” Continue reading
16 Saturday Apr 2016
Posted in poetry
Tags
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, fairy tale, frog, poem, poetry, princess
Fairy Tale
For Nuala
I balance my golden tiara with the poise
of a Brocas woman carrying Irish linen
in a basket on her head. I have practiced
for days, pinned the shiny fabric of my dress
at the sides to prevent me from tripping,
pinked my cheeks until they sting
and the pores have opened like mouths
of small flowers where, night after night,
I have rubbed them and made them drink
a bar and a half of Carbolic Soap.
Oh, there you are, she says and I wait
for her to call me, Orlaith, beautiful.
But she snorts and says, you a princess? As if.
In the garden, I lean over the pond
and strain to see my reflection, as seepage
from the rubbish tip next door coats the water
from rim to centre, in glistening greige
that wobbles with the impact of my tiara
as it slips from my head. But a familiar voice
croaks, Princess, Princess, forget your tiara,
forget your mother. I will call you pretty
every day if you let me lay down with you
between your little silken sheets.
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough‘s poetic influences include Michael Ondaatje and Gary Soto. Her work has appeared in magazines such as Stand,The Rialto and Ink, Sweat & Tears. She has won prizes in several UK competitions, to include the most recent Cannon Sonnet or Not Competition. She now lives in Norfolk with her husband and three children, but spent many years living and working in places as diverse as Maastricht, Reykjavik, Jakarta, California and Florida. www.elisabethsennittclough.co.uk
26 Friday Feb 2016
Posted in poetry
Tags
The Piper Took the People
Old man, he calls them to the path of light.
Hurdy-gurdy music counts them in, tine
by metal tine; the grinding clockwork calls
to a vanished throng. Shoulders hunched beneath
a blanket skin - exposed to scribbled air.
Here in the shadow, he mutters the tune
to unlit doors. Be wary of the sun –
the Piper took the people, the houses
lean to listen for their laughter; hear the
vanished echo of the voices. Gone
to the end of never, gone to the end
of the road; gnarling on the handle, who
will listen - will fill these windows with faces?
Call for cheer in the taverns, bring boot-steps back
to cobbles? Who will open up and sing?
Jane Burn is a North East based writer and artist. Her poems have been published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies. Her first pamphlet, Fat Around The Middle was published in 2915 by Talking Pen. She also established the online magazine The Fat Damsel in this year.
13 Saturday Feb 2016
Posted in flash fiction
Tags
disney, fairy tale, feminism, flash fiction, hans christian andersen, pregnancy, princesses, reimagining, Sarah Thomasin, series, speculative
Princesses: Where are they now?
(Part four: The Little Mermaid)
Ariel has now spent more of her time on land than she ever did as a mermaid. Even swimming with what her relatives see as her strange bifurcated tail hardly seems strange anymore. She does think of the speed and power she had as a mermaid. She can barely hold her breath more than a minute now, and her gills closed up long since. She knows her sisters still shake their heads and sigh over her – why would anyone choose a life like that? Choose to change their body, at such great risk? Especially anyone with the great good fortune to be born a princess of the sea! She can’t explain to them that she always knew where she belonged.
As queen, Ariel has made it her business to ensure her human subjects all know how to swim. She visits all the schools regularly to impress the basics of water safety on classes full of chattering children. Her own son, to his grandparents’ relief, takes after the leggy side of the family. (Although she was delighted to find, behind his little ears, tiny gill flaps.) Sebastian – named for a long dead friend – regularly swims down to visit his mother’s family. And though the mermaids laugh and tug his feet, he keeps on going back. Ariel knows the feeling of being in the wrong element. She’s ready to let Sebastian leave the land forever. But as the heir to the throne, she knows there’ll be a row with his father. She finds herself wondering if it’s not too late: another heir would solve the problem.
But oh! How she wishes she could still spawn like her mother had! Human pregnancy was not something she’d factored in. Mind you, for her husband, she’d still go through worse.
Sarah Thomasin is a performance poet living in Sheffield. As well as saying poems out loud at every opportunity, they have had poems published in Now Then magazine, and in two English Pen collections, three Pankhearst Slim Volume anthologies (No Love Lost, Wherever You Roam, and This Body I Live In), The Sheffield Anthology (poems from the city imagined) and Poems For the Queer Revolution. They were also commissioned to create a limerick quiz about gender which appears in Kate Bornstein’s My New Gender Workbook. You can find Sarah online at www.sarahthomasin.com.
23 Wednesday Dec 2015
Posted in poetry
Tags
evil queen, fairy tale, magic mirror, poem, poetry, Snow White, Stephen Bone
Mirror
I hang before her like an oval moon.
In me her vanity gloats, imperfections shown;
a grey hair or increase in her tapered waist
is enough to bring her blood to a rolling boil.
None are safe.
Those whose youth and fairness I’ve exposed,
she has had worked to the bone
in her silk mills or worse. I would if I could -
to spare them from her green eyed spleen -
flatter her with my silver tongue,
but it is impossible for me to lie.
And now, a high born comes, hair blacker
than obsidian, skin white as starlight,
some say, snow.
Stephen Bone‘s work has appeared in various journals including Smiths Knoll, The Interpreter’s House, The Rialto and in online magazines such as Ink, Sweat & Tears, Snakeskin, The Lake. His first collection In The Cinema was published by Playdead Press in 2014.
11 Friday Dec 2015
Posted in poetry
Tags
fairy tale, fairytales, frog prince, Joanne Key, poem, poetry
Frog Prince
Startled awake by the rush
of wings, I saw him rise
through a haze of sunlight
and heart-shaped leaves.
Such beauty. But my eyes
couldn’t deny the caul of slime,
the flip-flap of his tatty webs,
or the glistening, wet-lipped
threat of his skin. Shining harlequin.
He fell to his knees beside me.
Tentatively, I traced the contours
of his body. He was softer
than I’d dreamt. I followed the definition
of thigh muscle, the bony ridges
along his spine, the sores
at his neck where I touched that awful
hollow throat and watched it balloon
under the pressure of unspoken words,
felt it push against my fingertips, fit to burst.
Joanne Key lives in Cheshire where she writes poetry and short fiction. She won 2nd prize in the 2014 National Poetry Competition and has previously been shortlisted for Poetry for Performance, The Bridport Prize, Mslexia Poetry Competition and The Plough Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared both online and in print. Completely in love with poetry, she writes every day and her work is often inspired by elements of fairytale and folklore.
