You are familiar with the tale.
A mermaid, sang with the most beautiful angelic sound.
Had to surrender voice to be human
and marry the prince.  He wanted another
princess, and poor mermaid dissolved
in the ocean.
 
Aphasia is:
A snake that coils and hisses.
Diabolical Ursula schemes to rule the ocean world.
An evil witch who casts a spell over speech.
A toothy fox ready to bite your head off.
A sudden end to your dreams,
only able to see a dark tunnel, the sun blocked.
 
Disney gave the story a happy ending, so Ariel
married the prince.   With courage and strength,
you overcome disability and are much better. 
You have learned much and are still alive.
A fairytale ending to a scary fable.

Forest shadows hide impairment.
Owls hoot, concealed in the dense canopy.
Tall, leafy trees flank the faint path.
Difficult to follow, wander aimlessly.
Lost, and the orange sun dips down;
walk in an endless maze.   
Leg weak, worry about falling. 
Disability is a war with no battles.
 
In a clearing, giant raccoons
with bushy whiskers, striped fur,
and ringed tails encircle us and watch
with reflective beady eyes.
Leader wears mask, makes handicap
fall behind, cannot run.  How to escape?
Will the fairy godmother help
or will the evil witch devour us?
 
Hear a car with music blaring
from the speakers.  Look towards
the sound and see a road. 
Hiking poles to get over the rocky trail,
right half of body weak.
Now, see the way to overcome
yet another challenge.

She,
of whom I used to know.
Her arms flail in the mist,
mine self still I search for.
 
Drink she her cup of tea,
fall she into the darkest water.
 
A few berries of Jupiter
and an ampule in my pocket red.
 
She and her thatched hut,
both burning in my figment of reality.
Ashes of hers hover
within the red hues.
 
Selene’s weeping and the glowing flames,
monochrome in my memory lane.
I look, I see the waning of my twilight.
Moonlight in her youthful vibrance,
an illusion to her deprived disposition.
 
Look I into her shattering self,
found I mine emaciated past.
Either she is the truth,
or I am still blindfolded in the labyrinth.
 
I watch, I devour this line of thought.
Lose I mine coat of black.
Foraging for subtle changes, 
I have blinded the sculptor in me.
The road which the callous me saw,
lay glued to the colour I remember.
Lands formed from undescended waters,
plants seeds into the cold depths.
Into the devouring tunnel of adulthood,
lured I by the sanity I am knit into.
 
Confused yet determined,

I return to my idle portrait. 

Past,
we know not.
Cherry blossom,
never did I endure.
Spectral rays emanate from the eternal owl,
know not I, mine cocoon.
Forever lost in the moonlit shallow,
an apple rotten at heart.
Sunken I am in the shifting sands,
returning home nevermore.
 
Wintery dawn and the whimpering tree line,
both drenched in the oblivious green.
From inside the moonlit cottage,
hear I my mother’s calls.
Calls,
my torn yesteryears still search for.
Run I towards her,
my face lingering in the vicinity.
Voices I do hear,
clouding the tears I shed.
 
Oh,
I know not why I am blind.
Blind,
to the oasis in my vicinity,
a cloak over my futility.
 
Days,
they never did caress my aching self,
lost in a patch of puerile limping.
Know I this photograph of old,
vanish soon into the grayscale.
 
My mother,
I would part ways with,
for chained we are to the eternal gale.
Forget I never,
the life she cared for,
nor the void my whimpering solitude
craved for.
 
It is the mind which suggests,
a puppet that garnishes the midnight gloom.
That which pulls apart the cocoon of youthful gallop,
leaves a bower empty for innate sway.
A string of cotton held against the foggy morrow.
A queer lady sobbing in the distance.
 
Yet part I not,
with the celestial ringing
in my apple seed of existence.
Live I this moment,
listening to those calls of hope.
 
Roots that entwine in morning's glory,
numbs the eyes that search.
The unhindered moonlight lures and testifies,
my misadventure into the marsh of desire.
 
Now I am here,
amidst the chirping bulbuls

and the view of the eternal Selene.

Listen carefully to these words.
 
The Big Bad Wolf to Little Red Riding Hood.   Mama,
Papa, and Little Bear to Goldilocks.  Puss in Boots to
his young master.  Several fairy tales have animals talk
like actors in a Shakespeare play, reciting their lines.
Disabled people are understudies with stage fright, frozen
on stage.  The animals laugh at them, and they become
silent and still.  The damaged ones just watch the
performance as if from a distant alien world.
 
A different fairy tale, without words, just shadows
and sorrow. Aphasia stole their cracked brain, and threw
it down into a deep, cold, wet and dark well.  Broken
switches, misfired rifles, the lone soldier.   A long battle
ahead, they must overcome multiple obstacles.  Many
changes lead to a new beginning, but hard work will
set them free.  Through the thick tree canopy, the sun peaks.
 
A happy fairy tale ending is within reach.

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 several online poetry journals.  Writing poetry has helped her recover, and dictation fuels her words.

​March 5, 2025 06:18

Nothing. No one. Or other pieces of emptiness that wander through my atrophied memory. The big white birds talk among themselves incessantly, even in the middle of the night. The sea was yesterday a blue wall, which I would not have dared to cross for anything in the world. So beautiful. The elders once came from the other side of the horizon to here, and for them it was the end of the world. Pines tortured by the wind surround me, today, it’s blowing from the East, from Central Asia like the people here. An abandoned cathedral, Greek Orthodox and all white, was empty. The path climbed steeply to the top. We passed a cemetery without a cross. A man imitated a bird there, looking perfectly ridiculous. In my dream there was a painting painted thirty-five years ago broken by a stranger. I discovered a piece of it by chance at a friend's place who was indifferent to it. This strange character can't speak English, the others are bandits. In the gallery everyone thought I was rich, it makes him think about Under the Sun of Satan when he looks at them. At night I hear the heavy footsteps of the seagulls above my head, moving and screaming even in the middle of the night. They are insomniacs, winter is coming to an end, it's the season when they talk too much. Something or someone stole two eggs, as white as both my eyes, from a nest placed on a window ledge thirty meters above the ground. So she never came back. Human beings and animals are the same, it's sad or not. It’s the beginning of the fasting for some, the awakening for others, at six o'clock sharp. Life is paradoxical, as the angel Gabriel told me once. I have nothing to say against that, I don't know, nor will I ever know. I could have or should have jumped, no one would have known anything about it. She’s totally aware that suicide is the only way out for him if things keep on going like this. Others have always been afraid of him, rightly so, and vice versa. After madness, nothing will be the same again.
And yet, the blue sea was certainly not a wall for him, but an abyss, in the end.

I have noticed the other side of love
By the withered rose and the river at night. 
I collect and water them to give to the dove
And raise the flag of truce with the wings of a kite.
I bow down to love ignoring the proverb-
‘In war and love everything is fair’ and right
And keep at the threshold the point blank arrow
Hoping one of us may die without sorrow. 

They told me the curse was a kindness,
a spindle’s prick to spare the kingdom
from the burden of my broken mind.
“Let her sleep,” they said,
“Her thoughts too sharp, her tongue a thorn,
her dreams too vast for walls to hold.”
But I did not sleep.
Not in the way they meant.
In my cage of roses, I lay awake,
each thorn a needle threading whispers:
What if the curse was never kindness?
What if the silence wasn’t mercy?
What if my dreams were a forest
they feared to enter?
I grew wild there.
The briars were mine.
When the prince came, blade in hand,
I laughed to see him bleed--
for once, the world bent to my thorns.
He begged for a kiss to break the spell.
Instead, I offered him my dreams:
a tangle of shadows too sharp to untie.
Let him sleep now.
Let him know what it means
to carry a forest inside.

I was always the broken one,
a jagged shard of mirrored light.
The fairest of them all--
but they never told me
fairness was a curse.
When they laid me in the glass coffin,
the dwarves wept salt that carved
rivers in their faces.
They did not know
the coffin was not a tomb
but a lens.
Through it, I saw the prince’s approach,
his perfect features fractured
by the warped glass.
I saw the cracks in his smile,
the pity behind his eyes.
I saw myself as they saw me:
a body polished and preserved,
an object too fragile to touch
but too pretty to let go.
So I shattered the glass
with my unkissed lips,
cut my way out of their story,
and left the prince bleeding on the forest floor.
He called me wicked,
but wicked is just what they name us
when we break the molds
they cast us in.
I wandered until I found a mirror
that didn’t lie.
And in its broken face,
I saw my own reflection--
whole at last.