To Penia, with Love

by Jaydn DeWald

It was a grim, Brothers Grimm season.
Our flies looked like tiny grim reapers.

We muttered pinkienail blessings over
Our boiled beets and too thin porridge.

A thick blanket of unanswered prayers
Under which, all night, I lay shivering.

I was the princess’s golden ball, alone
In a deep well. Birds circled overhead.

I had a piglet born with three ears: one
Between the others, so little, so human.

We’ll wind up in the paper, I believed,
Shushing its walleyed, bloodpink face.

Once in a clearing I found a belltower.
From it swung a noose of braided hair.

Listening to Father’s faraway fiddling,
Wreathing crowns of thorns, of florets.

The thin trees wore coats of nightbirds.
Sister cried, she said, to clean her face.

Father’s begrimed hands—dark gloves.
His bunioned feet—a werewolf’s paws.

The apples a witchlike spinster sold us
Induced such bleak, unsettling dreams.

The same birds circling inside the eyes
Of the ragged Wanted Poster’s convict.

A man stopped in and took our picture.
Pretend it’s your own child, he told me.

The wind sang in the stove like a sylph.
The man stooped under his black sheet.

Once, behind raspberry bushes, I spied
A sylvan séance. Seven demonic faces.

In the mornings, we gathered kindling,
Dropped sugarcubes to guide us home.

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