Young Writers Society

Time Stirred Them Like Leaves

Her breasts swell before her stomach.
She’s sinfully voluptuous, the prince whispers
To her each night, conjuring memories
Of those same words her stepsisters told her
When she was on the cusp of womanhood

Now she is on the cusp of something
Much more frightening: motherhood
She does not know how to tell the Prince
When it still feels as though they are
Strangers to each other in many ways

She wishes to shy away from his hands
that skim the parts of herself even she
doesn’t know yet, and now she is sharing her
body with two and it is easier to open her legs
to one of them than it is to open her heart to both.

Not that the Prince notices, but her heart
crowds her chest at night, and Cinderella realizes
there’s many things her husband doesn’t seem to notice.
As much as she wants to she can’t hold this against him,
not when Time has stirred them like leaves on an autumn breeze
And she imagines poor Charming is as dizzy from it all as she is.

The Lost Daughter of Wendy Darling

Wendy Darling cannot tame her daughter any
more than she can tame her daughter’s curls.
Her daughter was born with a heart stricken
By wanderlust, and Wendy can almost see
It spinning in her chest like a compass

Pointing north towards the second star to the right
Every night, after she tucks her daughter, her daughter
Sits by the window seat, tracing the night sky with her tiny
Hands. Wendy sees the handprints indented on the foggy
glass each morning. She never brings it up. It is a phase,

she tries to tell herself as her daughter demands stories,
tales of mermaids combing their hair with the bones
and tales of fairies fiercer than Venus fly traps who jealously
Guard the Boy who Never Grows Up and his band of Lost Boys.

She demands stories of Peter Pan and his wandering shadow
Every night when she crawls into Wendy’s lap, resisting as Wendy
hugs her close to her chest, reluctantly regaling skimmed accounts
Of her adventures or rather misadventures in Neverland

She leaves out the part where Peter laughed as he severed
Hook’s hand from his arm or how he proudly displays it by
his bed. She leaves out the way Peter prowls the night skies
in search of little girls with hearts too big for their chests and

She certainly leaves out the part where she swooned and lost herself
And parts of herself like her innocence to the boy who loses his shadow

She leaves out the vinaigrette of regret marinating in her bones
For the past two decades, the shame she still reels from that
Even her own husband doesn’t know of and will never know of.

But, as her daughter approaches the cusp of adolescence,
Wendy realizes her mistake when she hears her daughter
draw back the curtains at night and opens the window
to welcome in the breeze and the boy without his shadow.
She is powerless to shelter her daughter from him or even herself.

Her daughter’s heart has been raised on fairy tales,
and it restlessly knocks against its cage of ribs like a bird
ready to take flight any day now. Wendy expects Peter Pan
to arrive riding the breeze and holding out his hand like a bargain
luring her into his reedy arms with promises o fairy dust
and fairy tales that she can live and write herself.

He will cup his palm like a question mark as if
her daughter is the answer, and she will say yes
faster than Wendy herself said yes, and this inevitable
moment turns her blood into a frozen mist, but she already
knows her daughter is lost. She knows her daughter’s heart
Is beyond the scope of her embrace because it has already
taken root in Neverland and Peter Pan will make it flower.

I absolutely love "Wendy Darling Knows Things Now" and "The Lost Daughter of Wendy Darling". The way you've crafted Wendy's character into a chilling poem is so beautiful. "He will cup his palm like a question mark as if/her daughter is the answer, and she will say yes" - I love this line. I'm really loving your poetry!

Eternal, thanks so much! I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed both my Wendy Darling poems and my poetry in general! I don't know how original my take on Wendy's character and her narrative is, but it's a fun one to explore, especially when you really become aware of how dark Peter Pan is in the original story. And by the way, that's a favorite line of mine as well!

Rumplestiltskin and other hungry men

CW for incest and child abuse

Being Human

To the little mermaid the hardest thing
about being human is getting used to breathing.
She feels her flimsy lungs recoil and collapse with
every tedious breath. The prince used to send her lungs
and heart into a frenzy, but these days her heart bobs
in her chest like an aimless piece of driftwood.

She finds life on land to be insipid.
She misses gliding through water.
She misses the prismatic iridescence of her world.
Now her world is painted in muted shades of brown.

She finds that her legs, those silly human things
she envied in her foolish youth, to be too pale,
like the belly of a dead fish, from a lack of sunlight.
She can’t even use them for dancing, because queens
keep their legs closed (or open) at their king’s discretion.

She hasn’t danced since her wedding day.
Now she hides her legs under a hoop skirt,
folding her legs over each other as if to make
them disappear like dart fish retreating to the reef
to evade the sharks scavenging the water for prey.

And she has learned from her ten years on land,
that princes armed with dazzling smiles are the real
sharks, Beautiful but not to be underestimated.
Then again, she thinks, smiling madly at the
full moon, neither are mermaids.

Though sometimes her prince forgets She hails
from sirens whose voices bring ships
to their demise and every night when she lies
beside her husband, she hears the call of the sea
the roar of the water pulsing in her ears like her heart,
and she dreams of the day when her flimsy silky lungs
will fill with a siren song and the salt and blood
instead the stale air that tastes of earth and humans.

Carving Up the Darkness

Alice is sure that she will paint
the town with her tears. She knows
the whispers that ghost her, rumors
of her alleged madness, but she knows
a spiral into madness is a different type
Of plunge than a fall down the rabbit hole.

At night, she closes her eyes and chases
rabbits down holes, hoping to find one in
a waistcoat and her heart ticks in her chest
in synch to the pocket watch he no doubt clutches.

In the gray mornings, on her balcony, she smokes,
and wonders what the Caterpillar is doing
As her lips create storm clouds of smoke.
the plumes drift and disintegrate on the wind
lke her thoughts these days as she drinks

from the well of her memories, head tilted back
Like the time she fearlessly partook of the potion
That shrunk her, and now that she is back home,
Home has a different way of shrinking her

What would she give for another tea party
Where the Mad Hatter would assure her that
She is the sane one because she see things.
And at night, she swears she see things, like

a glowing pair of green eyes and a wry
smile carving up the darkness. The shadows
flicker like the flick of a tail, a greeting or parting,
she still isn’t sure. She just knows that the walls
are her prison because the tail is swallowed up
by the darkness before she can grab ahold of it.