My birth was christened with a curse
but every year those parties were flurries
of bon fires and candle sparklers.
My feet didn't touch the dance floor
it seemed, not once, while
the orchestra was playing
a whirling dervish of a waltz
bangs cropped carefree
across the plains of my tanned face,
swishing and twirling the knee length
pink gown,
kicking off pinching white flats to steal
across the June-hot grounds
only to drift back to father’s feet
for another dance.

The orchestra packs up,
the courtly ladies yawn behind trailing sleeves
as I am tucked in
my bed of feathered down, only to wake up  
thirteen years later, with cricks
nestled in the tendons of my neck
and rickety cramps twitching like
the seizure flickering of lightning bugs
through my thighs, as dust billows and rises
with my shifting in the strange light.

Sleeping Beauty wakes up
eighty-seven years ahead of schedule
in the suburbs, the curse a dud
with no prince to sweep her into syrupy swoons
with no words to name this coiling, clammy heat,
this suffocating musk.

I drag my weight
through the two-story house, teaching myself
a new vocabulary
so I can learn to breathe
through the ugly fits of orange tinted panic
at the spider webbed frailty of magic
the kismet pinprick of a spinning wheel
and the helpless sighs of my parents,
a King and Queen dethroned, overthrown
from their untouchable, eternal pedestal.

I couldn't dance
at my next birthday celebration,
when the orchestra was playing
a rollicking rondeau,
mostly because
my hair was too slicked and curled,
framing my fickle new skin,
sitting and twisting a silk napkin in my lap,
ribs locked in the powder blue grip of a whale,
resting poised to turn my toes into graceful
creatures, ten crippled wood nymphs.
To run I would have stumbled,
and it was impossible not to notice that
while we stood, my eyes grazed the top
of father’s thinning, speckled head.
I would break his feet with one more dance.