Nick Flynn

Sleeping Beauty

When Sleeping Beauty finds the spindle

& pricks her finger & falls into her hundred-

year sleep, everyone around her falls as

well—her handmaids, her grooms, the cooks.

Dogs collapse in the courtyard, horses fold

in on themselves in the hay . . . . I’d forgotten

all that. Even the fire returns to embers,

fire’s version of sleep. In some tellings all

this sleep is a blessing, a solution to grief—

no one will miss her because they will sleep

as long as she sleeps & they will wake

when she wakes, no one having felt

a thing. Is this what we want, to take

everyone with us, to leave no one behind?

To find a way not to feel all the days you

are not here? Some days I wish I could

sleep for a hundred years, other days

I wonder if I’ve ever really been awake.

In one version the curse is uttered by

a crone, in another by a fairy. The castle,

in both versions, as everyone falls &

almost at once, becomes overgrown—

wild roses, thick with thorns, surround its

walls, so thick they will tear the flesh of

anyone who dares come close. When I

tell you I’m a wounded animal this is what

I mean—I am the thorn & I am the spindle

& I am the curse . . . no one will remember

the years they felt nothing. 

God’s Will

Isn’t there a bird (what’s its name?)

that collects blue

things—bottle cap, rubber band,

bits of broken

cups—to make an elaborate, sparkling

blue nest on the ground. At

a meeting, a woman spoke of

her brother, who’d just

OD’d—teary,

she said she knew it was God’s

will. We all want to be held

a little higher. Bower

bird, that’s the name, it gathers

all that blue

& arranges it into a nest                                

to make the beloved, of course, 

want to stay. 

Geffrey Davis