Table of Contents

  Introduction
  1. Mapping the Ways
  2. Spinning the Tales
  3. Voices & Viewpoints
  4. Spell Binding & Spell Breaking
  5. Magical Objects
  6. Desire & Its Discontents
  7. The Grimm Sisterhood
  8. Variations & Updates
  9. Ever After, Or a Few Years Later
  10. Living the Tales
  About the Authors
  Acknowledgments
  Selected Bibliography
  Index of Poems by Tale
  Index of Authors and Titles
  About the Editors

N I C O L E    C O O L E Y

Rampion

Tiny blue flowers furred with dirt are all the woman desires
in the story my mother reads over and over. Once upon a time

a woman longed for a child, but see how one desire easily
replaces the next, see her husband climbing the high garden wall

with a handful of rampion, flowering scab she's traded for a child.
Look, my mother says, see how the mother disappears

as rampion's metallic root splits the tongue like a knife
and the daughter spends the rest of the story alone.

I study a watercolor of the daughter's tower where she waits
for the prince, twisting and spinning her long shining hair. Already

I know I will grow up to be that bad mother, throat stuffed with dust,
mouth a blistering ache, promising anything, forgetting

the baby swimming inside me, baby the size of a fist, baby
taking root. This is the lesson: the mother drops out of the story.

See, my mother reads, the woman pines away with desire
but understand it's the wrong, selfish kind

because the mother's body should be just a country
the girl departs-pure blank horizon.