The Beast lived in a grand, old castle, while many animal servants scurried around. He was presumed feeble-minded because he could barely talk, his body grotesque. At the end of the fairytale, the Beast becomes a handsome prince again, able to profess his love. All lived happily ever after. Our experiences mirror one another. A severe stroke sewed my mouth shut, and handcuffed me in a hospital prison for months. Others assume I am simple-minded because aphasia scrambles my words, and my right side is broken and disfigured. Unfortunately, my progress is on a treadmill, never moving forward. Roadblocks remain. There is no happy ending. 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 is the author of Stormy Road: Reawakening from Stroke and Aphasia. She has been published in four chapbooks, and several online and written poetry collections. Writing poetry has helped her recover, and dictation fuels her words.
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so they came wandering from the woods hand in hand, the boy younger clothes like torn leaves their hair dry rushes and we broke off harvest dropped scythe and rake crossed ourselves in fear of their green their green skin as true as I stand their strange babble like corncrakes in the stubble thrushes fluting in the hedge refused our bread, chewed raw green beans, like cats lapped water from the hand years on, green no more the boy being dead the girl baptised and godly speech restored - or learned anew - she told her tale: she spoke of bells a river, sunless St Martin’s Land, of tending flocks, a deep ravine - truth or fancy? She married well. Time twists memory to legend - fragments jag, distort like a splintered glass - but this we swear: from somewhere unbeknown two green children came. About the author:
After decades teaching in Scotland and Yorkshire, Lynda Turbet now lives in north Norfolk, where she observes the world from her wheelchair and tries to make sense of it all through writing. Her work has won prizes, has been published in online and print journals, and in themed anthologies. This is the story of the green children of Woolpit, Suffolk, which dates from the 14th century and is depicted in a window of the village church.
I My grey sisters never lived their youth They share one eye and one tooth Aligned as eggs they sleepwalk through our back yard and nest beneath our apple tree. Our kind mother is the Lady of Canines Under the surface of herself she has the distorted body of a swan and a cosmogonic castle of riddles. I absorbed I merged I forgave Amalgamated inward To slay I disdained Stood in the clearing alive as a forest II My armless body across currents of memory Do I lose control or clench as the impalpable axe in my floating palm hangs over stretches of white plankton An eroding seabed bears my pearl face Underneath I am eight years old my unripe hand clasps a pen I toss my small journal book in the depths of my throat -An undomesticated land of reversed periphery from the ocean’s floor, out into the forest, up the mountain, out into the river, out into the desert, stars come up, night falls over, my childhood house in flames Flesh in its boundless amorphous fate My crucible heart a geomorphic mystery of distance a melting agony of protruding golden arms About the author:
Maria Constanti is a performer from Cyprus, based in Athens, working across the fields of storytelling, music and devised performance. In her work she embraces practices that explore the body as the creative source of poetic and symbolic articulation, as a space for speaking in images from the body’s experience, informed by the underlying resonance of the mythic. She studied Classics at the University of Cyprus and researched postmodern reinterpretations of fairy tales at the University of Athens, performance practice and embodied dramaturgy at Arthaus Berlin Centre for Devised Theatre and Performance. |
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