#Me Too: Women in Touch with Their Anger
        In one of Grimm's Fairy Tales, the good girl goes to a pool
        and a troll appears in the water and asks to be combed; she complies,
        and as a reward, gold coins fall out of her mouth. The bad girl
        refuses, and as a penalty, toads fall out of her mouth.

She comes to the pool, where the head floats up
and wants to be combed.
"Comb me," he says,
but she is the bad girl this time:
"Comb yourself," she says,
and cracks the pitcher over his head:
bits of snail shell, marsh-muck, silt.

And will she go home and find, as a punishment,
fish gasping in her bed,
or will she have to run into the woods
sent out in her shoes of paper
to find strawberries in the snow?
Or will it be toads this time,
whenever she opens her mouth?
It is toads.

But think of that good girl and her fate,
the clatter of metal every time she speaks.
On her wedding night, coins clink on her pillow,
the gold falls into her arms
and wakes her: it's cold.
Her husband follows her from room to room,
ready to catch what falls—small talk, love talk.

In the alleys, on the cobbles,
people introduce themselves.
It would be impolite to refuse;
she shakes hands, says her name.
They wait for her to leave;
they stoop, they open their purses.

No, better to be the other one, the dark-haired one,
toads falling out of her mouth,
but at least this time she is not alone;
she has come to love them, the ugly toads, the venomous toads,
the ones she has been hiding:
they comfort her, they sing, they are alive.

Tweet

Copyright © 2022 Ellery Akers All rights reserved
from Swerve: Poems on Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance
Blue Light Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission