In this step-mother stage of life I am
bitten by old fairy tales, gray-green
as wolves and grim as the reaping
of those brothers whose eponymous
adjective gallops like a verb through their works,
warning us of life‘s inevitable,
our childhood‘s horsemen of the apocalypse.
Old fairy tales open their oven mouths
and I enter with candles of memory.
Dim light simmers with my dangerous thoughts.
I am an unfired vessel over flame.
I watch the family romance on the wrong
side of the glass, half-conscious of a scene
that features puppets and changelings.
Always angry and always disturbed in
some vague way, I am as though roused from dreaming
of my father or lost in a Trojan play.
Who is it who writes the step-mother‘s tale?
Where is the alison, the teller of truth,
alyssum to cure the rabies and mad dogs in this heart?
And what to do about the oven door that slowly closes?