THE SNOW QUEEN
A.E.
Richmond, Maine
A little girl looking at the birches
Stoops in the snow by the stream
No mittens
She breaks the thin layer
The ice lodges rapidly downstream
She fills the plastic pail with cold water
Her eyes squint in the sun and she imagines
Great things
The water is heated up
In the trailer
No insulation and only a hole in the floor
To shit in
Frost on the bedroom wall
Her mother reads from Revelations
The girl knows she is a terrible sinner and worse, a girl
Her father curses and bellows at a round wooden table
Of merry men
Snorting and guzzling
Deals are made
All the while her hair is tangled, and her clothes are weird
She has promise
Judgement is at hand
Also, casually from a godless view too
From all angles she is not good enough
Aunts furrow their brows at the dirty smiling girl
As if she was the Queen that brought it all about
She understands every opinion and every silent insult
Nobody loves her because nobody is capable of love
Her life is a dress poorly made
Loose stitching, bunches of bleached material fading
Zippers that don’t budge
Shoestrings that can’t bear to be tugged on
The whole outfit of life
Not good enough to go out into it all
And be something
Shame is the name
Buttons with frazzled thread
Years later but still young
She ends up sitting by a pool on a sunlit day
Her legs calmly dangled in the water
Her natural smile with freckles and long curly hair
The prismatic shadows of pool water dancing around
And she is noticed as the most beautiful girl ever seen
Still every hand that touches her, she yearns for them to be soft and caring
Is lifeless dough, egg and milk that falls onto her, mis-measured
I married that girl
I fail her everyday
Now we hide the hard, hollow chambers from our children
The places where the lamp long ran out of oil
Every morning in desperation
To fix what has been eternally broken
Sometimes we dance and laugh
And snow lands harmlessly outside
Amongst the thick undergrowth of new forest.
There is no path to her heart
I sink into the deep snow, pull myself up by precarious twigs
Scan the streams and find the narrow way to get to the place where nobody goes.
I find her.