A folklore poem

 Cinderella

Our primal Europathic pubescent girl myth

all dressed up in charming patriarchy

& yet carrier of the good witch

fairy godmother virus

which the Vatican almost eradicated

with its feudal bloodletting & auto-de-fé flames

but here survives infecting even valley girls

with some wild lost scent of the goddess.

The story Chinese originally

9th century Taoist tale

told with spice & Marco Polo'd

back to the Mediterranean.

How yin yang

with luck it goes

from rags to riches

gutters to golden slippers

& all too soon is gone

at the midnight hour

when we freeze in place

Delphic statuary wreathed

& lyred in our own polished fable

facing the forever eternal now.

Happily ever after

or not.

Karen Bellerose

 

Burn Barbie Burn

 

Karen Bellerose

Burn Hollywood Burn, I smell a riot

Goin’ on, first they’re guilty, now they’re gone

Yeah, I’ll check out a movie

But it’ll take a Black one to move me.

               -“Burn Hollywood Burn”                                      by Public Enemy

Walking out after The Barbie Movie I want to roll in the nearest patch of dirt 
sink my low heels in thick slurpy mud that will ooze through my toes 
and into the crevices under my too-long toenails
until the entire earth becomes my shoes and I am grounded.

I crave this feeling like a bad dream wants a pinch
so I can be sure 
that I have escaped the prison of
straight way-too-white teeth, 
perfectly fringed and highlighted bangs
neat clean nails painted pale peach
white shorts with a taut tank top in summer salmon and
the sweet-spicy scent of someone else’s fantasy.

Instead of finding dirt and mud, 
when I leave the theater 
I see a Barbie 
walking in stacked heels down one of only a few paved streets
that have parted the waters of wilderness
looking like she just came out of the box. 

Her shine, her swagger, her unnatural coloring
a reminder of a world that never was. 
A deep sigh escapes me because

I am so weary of glamor

of false beauty and forever 21
of clipped lawns and obedient flowers 
of stone that has been beaten to a perfect square
and made to line up for the benefit of slick shoes and high heels
of superior architecture rising from the graveyard of a fallen aspen family.

The new and improved, to me, is almost always less than
tangled hair that has had a conversation with a bursting breeze
or a scratched arm that bears the touch of an outstretched juniper branch.

Put my bunioned feet in a pair of stinky sneakers
worn flat from following the uneven trails made by deer and elk
and paths made messy by stray twigs and leaves that have fallen 
where no one will pick them up
or blocked by branches that lay where the wind placed them 
or overgrown with life that pushes through in its irregular way.

I love the before where there were only wild flowers and sweet grasses and 
every-shaped stones that have never met a hammer. 
much more than this after, 
this traveling sideshow of superficial spectacle
that I wish would follow that paved road right on out of town.

Karen's SPRUCE and SAGEBRUSH website

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