Alice Makes a Crown
If you go there,
wear bittersweet
in your hair.
Winter’s little harvest;
the wolf is in
the forest.
It was dark
inside the wolf.
She sang for a heart—
to beat, to crack open.
Alice was born
with her foot in
her mouth.
No one cut
the bitch’s belly;
she crawled out.
Wolves gave her
a bed of dandelions,
a dense sunflower.
She woke up in the forest.
She fell asleep in Wonderland.
She howled to the top of Everest:
Rabbit, rabbit
gave her luck
for the whole year.
Alice Out of Wonderland
Here I am anything
but loved.
My feet don’t fit. I’m too
tall to sleep
in the gray love seat,
its leather
casing. Why did I fall back
through the portal?
My brush rabbit is gone,
burrowed all the hay for a bright carrot,
its green tuft.
Most moved on
from wonder’s playing cards,
the black of spades.
They left me to dream alone, to tuck
myself in—a little everlasting.
Why did I fall back
to gray minutia?
She won’t help me
find the key. They kept talking about
nothings—
television and old stories
from years ago
with the furor as if they happened yesterday.
The geese are calling,
weaving a straight V
above the flying buttresses.
If only I had wings
to lift and fly.
Maybe I could dive through
the window pane
sneak into the house of dreams,
where there are children reading,
where no one calls me a child.
Natalie Staples earned a BA from Kenyon College and an MFA from the University of Oregon. Her work has appeared in SWWIM. She is a poetry editor for the Northwest Review.
Header photo by Svetlana Smirnova, courtesy Shutterstock.
