Briar Rose

by Debra Cash

A hundred years of dreams —

I would not have given up an hour

of those shifting landscapes, the tower, the lagoon

the rough roses making a cradle around my bed.

Everything stops

for me and for everyone else I know

while behind my wincing eyelids I absorb

my parents' recklessness.

We wanted the best for you, they'll tell me:

all those girlish virtues

a pretty face and figure, kindness to the poor

the ability to sing and play the spinet.

Inviting the colors of the rainbow to my Christening,

spraying me with holy white light,

they locked out one color of the spectrum

the darkness that absorbs it all

and I blame my father. Maleficent came to his birth

just as surely as she did to mine:

the difference is that everyone knew her then

when her name was Poverty and Need

and the guests all bowed their heads. In our day,

my birthday, no one expected her.

Evil, they called her. I call her

Resentment. Fury. Locked away, I dream

and no one tells me what to do.

No one breaks in. And when a stranger offers me a spindle

glistening, sexual, I sink into the pillows

and remember the worst has already happened:

I have survived death and turned it into sleep

and a dream lasting one hundred years.

When I wake

I will know my lover's face.