Pinocchio was born into poverty in desperately bleak times,
he was the eldest of ten children, half human, half scavenger,
always battling illness and hunger, barely living, just surviving,
on a long narrow street which didn’t allow natural sunlight.
 
Pinocchio was forever dreaming about being made of pine wood,
so he wouldn't have to be hungry and thirsty all the time.
His angry ugly rumbling tummy gurgled and guzzled and gobbled
him up, all up. He longed for a blue magical fairy to save him.
 
Instead, he was sent far, far away, to ease the burden on his parents, 
to live in a village with his mother’s family. All he ever wanted
was to see his mother again, to feel at home again, to be healthy,
happy and not have to suffer so many ordeals, over and over again. 
 
Pinocchio’s journey was full of terrible trauma, so much tragedy,
so much sadness, even the fabulous adventures made him sick.
The world was so beautiful but also so dreadfully ugly, it made him wish
all the more to be a wooden pine puppet living in a better world.
 
In his dreams he saw the magical Blue Fairy, who gently whispered:
Prove yourself brave, truthful and unselfish,
and someday you will be a true real puppet.
A boy who won't be good might will never be made of wood.
 
Pinocchio tried and strived to be brave, truthful and unselfish,
he tried not to wish for the moon, the oceans and the stars.
He gave so much to everyone, helped and helped till he couldn’t give
any more. Exhausted he slumped down, despondent and scared.
 
He felt sick down to his stomach at this terrible world, only in his
magical dreams of fairies did he see a way through, Oh, Fairy, Fairy!
Why am I still not made of pine wood? I’ve been brave, truthful and unselfish.
And Blue Fairy smiled so warmly and whispered, You already are.
 
And Pinocchio wept and wept with traumatised joy, sadly unaware that
whilst he was away, his family suffered tragedy as six of his siblings died.
Pinocchio was the lucky one to escape, to be free, but he never saw
his mother again, never spent one perfect day together, never was home.

About the author:
Peter Devonald is a UK based poet/screenwriter who has lived with disability most of his life. He is winner Waltham Forest Poetry 2022, Heart Of Heatons Poetry Awards 2023 & 2021, joint winner FofHCS 2023 and second in Shelley Memorial Poetry 2024. Finalist in Tickled Pink ekphrastic contest 2024, highly commended Hippocrates Prize and Passionfruit Review 2024, shortlisted for OxCanalFest Poetry 2024, Saveas & Allingham 2023. Poet in residence Haus-a-rest, Forward Prize nominated, two Best Of The Net nominations and widely published including Broken Spine Anthology, London Grip, Door Is A Jar, Bluebird Word, Vipers Tongue, Voidspace and Loft Books. 50+ film awards, former senior judge/ mentor Peter Ustinov Awards (iemmys) and Children’s Bafta nominated.
www.scriptfirst.com
Instagram: @peterdevonald
Facebook: @pdevonald
Twitter/X: petedevonald

A little child locked in the airing cupboard,
spiralling music plays to evoke the magical,
but all the little child feels is trapped.
 
Outside the older sister laughs to see such fun,
playing at her own little fabulous fairy tale,
lost in her bewildering imagination, never stops
to wonder at the damage done.
 
Fifty years on the child still hates confined spaces,
the fabulous music still the soundtrack to his dreams,
persecuting and prodding with a witches spell.
 
He lived in fairy tales all his life, wrote himself better,
but always witches watched, whispered and cackled.
 
He wondered why his sister ate the poisoned apple,
slept for a thousand years, supressing the past.

About the author:
Peter Devonald is a UK based poet/screenwriter who has lived with disability most of his life. He is winner Waltham Forest Poetry 2022, Heart Of Heatons Poetry Awards 2023 & 2021, joint winner FofHCS 2023 and second in Shelley Memorial Poetry 2024. Finalist in Tickled Pink ekphrastic contest 2024, highly commended Hippocrates Prize and Passionfruit Review 2024, shortlisted for OxCanalFest Poetry 2024, Saveas & Allingham 2023. Poet in residence Haus-a-rest, Forward Prize nominated, two Best Of The Net nominations and widely published including Broken Spine Anthology, London Grip, Door Is A Jar, Bluebird Word, Vipers Tongue, Voidspace and Loft Books. 50+ film awards, former senior judge/ mentor Peter Ustinov Awards (iemmys) and Children’s Bafta nominated.

www.scriptfirst.com
Instagram: @peterdevonald
Facebook: @pdevonald
Twitter/X: petedevonald

Ella Enchanted couldn't get the Glass Slipper on,
let alone imagine dancing the night away until midnight;
swollen feet and broken dreams, she stayed indoors and slept
her life away. Her Fairy Godmother gave her beautiful dreams,
of coaches made of pumpkins, horses that once were mice,
footmen who were all lizards and a coachman who remains a rat.
Her dirty rags transformed magically into a beautiful dress,
an amazing hallucination dream, where everything is possible.
Night terrors they call it, night sweats, another symptom in a land
where illness is queen, but what of her handsome king, waiting?
Another day another symptom, spinning webs of falling dreams
from worn down spindles, so much pain to be a sleeping beauty,
horrible power of invisible diseases, creeping, crawling, crying,
wishing on a purple star, one day she’ll find her happily ever now.

About the author:
Peter Devonald is a UK based poet/screenwriter who has lived with disability most of his life. He is winner Waltham Forest Poetry 2022, Heart Of Heatons Poetry Awards 2023 & 2021, joint winner FofHCS 2023 and second in Shelley Memorial Poetry 2024. Finalist in Tickled Pink ekphrastic contest 2024, highly commended Hippocrates Prize and Passionfruit Review 2024, shortlisted for OxCanalFest Poetry 2024, Saveas & Allingham 2023. Poet in residence Haus-a-rest, Forward Prize nominated, two Best Of The Net nominations and widely published including Broken Spine Anthology, London Grip, Door Is A Jar, Bluebird Word, Vipers Tongue, Voidspace and Loft Books. 50+ film awards, former senior judge/ mentor Peter Ustinov Awards (iemmys) and Children’s Bafta nominated.

www.scriptfirst.com
Instagram: @peterdevonald
Facebook: @pdevonald
Twitter/X: petedevonald

​‘We have come to the utmost position of the development.’-
The evening with the ruction. (May go far the camel without cactus.)
The owl looks at the watch and finds a watch dozing at the square
With rushing vehicles and advertisements
And then the come-hither in the moribund city.
(The city has been a rubber stamp of the robust canker.)
And gets tapped and trapped a lone womb in the seminar hall.
And after that gets glorified white fluid.. white fluid…white fluid.
Yet
Swims, no doubt, the vendetta in the slurred utterance.
Yet
The cruel significant of technology in the basement shows on its broken teeth.
And at the threshold cries the petal of a white rose.
(The morning is too obscure to identify the wrinkles of the bastard.)
‘And there will be no ending of the flow of dry corpses.’
Thinking so throws the last sign of cancer in the air Satan.
 
Is there no comeuppance since then?
 
Have you met any of it in the chained rendezvous? 

​I’m tired of all the prayers and the apologies
People who care tell me I need to stop
apologizing, but for once—-I am Not The One
Apologizing. Not apologizing for my existence, as
one of my close friends always tells me.
Stop apologizing for existing. But, how can I stop
when everyone seems to want to tell me that they are sorry for me?
I don’t want your prayers or your ‘fake apologies’, because
“the world doesn’t end, it just feels like it does.”
I don’t know who I’m supposed to be when everyone
keeps using their teacher pointer-finger to tell me that
something is wrong with my body.
My entire life, my own father asked me what was wrong with me,
but not because he cared. I stopped having an answer to give people
whenever they asked me this. When will people stop pointing their finger
At Me? I’m not a circus attraction, I’m a human being.
You’re sorry that this ‘happened’ to me? If someone else tells me this,
I will fucking flee! I’m tired of the fake sympathy and the fake apologies.
I’m tired of the unrealistic optimism—the unrealistic words that “maybe you will outgrow it.
Sometimes if you are diagnosed when you are younger,
you will outgrow it by the time you are old.” Just stop.
Just fucking stop. Just stop with the stares, the prayers, and the apologies.
I’ve expected the mourning of my own body, so why can’t you?
Why do you feel the need to heal me? I don’t want to be healed
and I didn’t ask for it. "But, does the world really end?
They say it just feels like it does. But, would I actually rather be me?"
Who is this version of me that everyone else sees? Who is she?

Quotations in italics taken from the song, ​"I'd Rather Be Me', from the Mean Girls Musical.

I’m 18 when I grow my flight feathers.
They itch and stem from my shoulder blades.
My mama rubs a towel onto my skin where the feathers have torn their way through me.
 I’m scared and shaking. I still don’t know why, don’t know how this is happening.
 
There’s a party for me. Mama cuts two slits in the back of my thobe. My thobe is a beautiful embroidered dress. I feel bad cutting it up.
We dance, all my female relatives, in thobes like mine, wings proudly jutting out from their backs.
My wings are small. There’s still room for them to grow. I spread them as much as I can, mimicking the way the other women move their wings.
We all dance with platters full of candles and flowers held on our heads. I take a platter and balance it the best I can with one hand while fan out my skirt with the other, bunching up the fabric.

Learning to fly is difficult, but I teach myself how to stay in the air pretty quickly.
When I fly, I imagine that everything below me belongs to me because I flew over it.
When I fly, I feel what little freedom I am afforded.
 
Flying is an exclusively female freedom. No men have grown wings.
I take great pride in my flight feathers. In the twin slits in the back of my thobe. In my wind-blown hair. Even the pain of molting. All the good and bad.
Wings are a rite of passage, and I have grown my flight feathers.

Flying towards the beautiful, distant horizon
the pilot, in charge, scrutinized the brain
focused on center of runway
 
Suddenly, the snow twirled and swirled
stroke causes plane to slide off the end of tarmac
what’s going to happen?
 
With grit and strength
determination rules
aphasia now controls the airspace
 
Landed in a foreign country
cannot speak or understand the language
new journey is ready to begin

Forest, dark and scary.   Will I lose the
magic beans?   Animals speak,
ogres growl, and wolves disguised.
Fairy tales read to me as a child,
are remembered as an adult. 
 
My story begins with a black, pointed hat
and scraggly broom.  A witch suddenly
appears, casts a spell, and causes a stroke
that almost kills me.   Grey matter twisted,
and the enchantress short circuits my brain.
 
Aphasia is a serpent that stings,
an ordeal of shadows and contrasts.
My mind is filled with jumbled shapes,
nonsense words, and mixed-up colors.
Demons shout sinister curses.  Still cloudy,
but I see the sun start to peek through.

The woods are mysterious with trees
that mark the trail.  Branches tightly
packed, light wanes, and the moon provides
no illumination.    I am lost without
a map or compass.  Now nighttime,
hear a chorus of frightening sounds. 
Alone in a hedge labyrinth, unable to
find the exit.
 
Disability steals the rainbow, colors
grayed and dark.  I dream of life
before the stroke, when all I knew
about the brain was a green gelatin mold
for Halloween.  I wake up and the
nightmare returns.  Like Rumpelstiltskin,
I stomped my feet and disappeared down a chasm.
 
Will I ever leave my fairy-tale world?

About the author:
Rochelle M. Anderson lives in Minnesota, USA.   She is an attorney who had a severe stroke in 2007 and almost died. She is still disabled with difficulty walking; and because of aphasia struggles with reading and writing. Ms. Anderson has been published in four chapbooks and in an online poetry journal. Writing poetry has helped her recover; and dictation fuels her words.