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
23 Saturday Jan 2016
Posted in flash fiction
Tags
age, fairy tales, feminism, flash fiction, princesses, prose, reimagined, Sarah Thomasin, series, Snow White, speculative, story, women
Princesses: Where are they now?
(Part One: Snow White)
People often mistake her name for a reference to her hair, these days. When she tells them no, that was the name she was born with, and strokes her tanned, wrinkled, liver spotted cheek, murmuring “white as snow” the nurses smile fondly at each other. Her lips are still bright red though, the lipstick applied with a shaky hand. They call her obstinate. The prince – the king – died years ago. He was a few years older when they married, but that sort of thing didn’t raise eyebrows, in those days. Still, she’d have liked to stay with the dwarves. The closest to parents that she ever knew, truth be told. Although she never really let them nurture her – she never really knew how. Letting yourself be loved wasn’t a skill she’d needed. They would have loved her like a daughter though, if she’d let them, and that meant a lot. Sometimes she catches herself in the mirror (an old heirloom): gaunt face, dark ringed eyes, a slash of crimson, and starts, seeing her stepmother again. She wonders, vaguely, if life is really fair to widowed queens.
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.
06 Wednesday Jan 2016
Posted in poetry
Tags
Carole Bromley, fairy tales, poem, poetry, retelling, Snow White
Snow White
I’ve nothing against little men
and there’s safety in numbers.
Seven felt about right.
All day I’d the house to myself
and a girl needs her space.
I had to promise not to open the door
but that was a small price.
Every morning they’d be off,
hi-hoeing down the path
with their shovels and picks.
The chairs were a tad snug,
it was like living in a doll’s house
but I was happy, I was safe,
I was singing all day long
till I opened the window
to the witch, took an apple,
bit into it and you know the rest.
The whole prince to the rescue scene.
Still it was better than back home
where people talked to mirrors
and didn’t like the answers.
Carole Bromley is a teacher from York. She has two pamphlets and a collection from Smith/Doorstop and a second book, The Stonegate Devil, was published in October 2015. Carole is the Stanza rep for York, blogs at www.yorkmix.com and from October 2015 has been running poetry surgeries in York for the Poetry Society. Website www.carolebromleypoetry.co.uk
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.
02 Friday Oct 2015
Posted in poetry
Tags
Andie Berryman, fairytale, hospital, modern, poem, poetry, sleeping beauty, Snow White
Sleeping Beauty
She lies in the glass case,
cupid bow lips as red as blood
Skin as white as snow
waiting for her prince to come.
He’s due in about five minutes.
The dwarf watches over Her
briefly shooed away by him.
The Prince looks over beauty
and marks something down on a chart
leaves in a white coat flourish
the dwarf continues her vigil.
Andie Berryman campaigns against the patriarchal construct of fairytales in all its capitalist forms (especially Disney). Andie writes reviews and sometimes, stories and poems.
06 Sunday Sep 2015
Posted in poetry
Tags
fairytales, poem, poetry, retelling, Sarah Ghoshal, sequence, Snow White, wicked queen
Chasing the Reflection
It’s true that you
can’t see me but
I see you
hoping that no one
will see you.
The reign isn’t
so perfect from over
here.
I’m following your
story, you know.
Figuring out if
you deserve it,
if she was really
the one whose
strength would save
us all. But we were
blinded by the blackness
and the strife
and her insecurities
and we believed in the
idea of you.
Can you see us,
All of us,
Judging you through
The mirror?
18 Saturday Jul 2015
Tags
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.
16 Saturday May 2015
Tags
addiction, almost sestina, fairytale, Mab Jones, poem, poetry, retelling, sestina, Snow White
Ever, After
Imagine Snow White with her colors mixed up:
eyes black as coal and lips white as snow,
hair red as the rose that blooms in the glass,
that once filled her throat: the color of stop.
Her bracelets are scars, her necklace a rope
of clear plastic beads that look just like tears.
Seventeen years but her body’s fresh snow
marked by deep tracks, by the burn of the rope
she pulls to bring the shy vein singing up
like a river from the arm, to fill the glass
with its red plume, via the needle that tears
at the flesh. She has no power to stop
using, or being used. They bind her with rope
and sit there like kings, commanding her tears,
music to them as they move mounts of snow
through trumpeted notes. They beat her up
and laugh, laugh again, when she begs them to stop.
And after their play, her face in the glass:
eyes black as kohl from the swift-flowing tears
that only the needle’s puncture can stop.
with sharp steel she’ll prick the thin vein like rope
and swoon into a blank of television snow,
the static that storms behind the glass
at transmission’s end. Turn the volume up:
silence. How quickly the needle can stop
all sounds, as if she’s been laid under glass;
can, with its cold point, stem the hot tears
and, with the same touch, slice the slick rope
that binds body and mind. Strings of patched up
memories, thought threads, buried beneath a snow
drift. The grim reaper’s ticking hour glass
momentarily mute. She’d never wake up
if choice was hers; if she could bring full stop
to this mortal world of blood, sweat and tears
and remain a princess asleep in the snow,
pulled to her casket by the tight rubber rope.
A fairy-tale fuck-up, she tells snow
white lies sometimes to the glass: that she’ll stop,
soon. A rope that she clings to; that easily tears.
*(Previously published in Parthian anthology Ten of the Best, and Nonbinary Review in the USA)
Mab Jones is “a unique talent” (The Times) who is known mostly for her satirical verse, which she has performed all over the UK, in the US, France, Ireland, and Japan, and on BBC Radio 4. She is also resident poet in the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and a writer of plays and prose. www.mabjones.com
