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There lived happily a girl

     Her great alone
her little pillow for the dead
   her winter warm as blood

—its darkest empty
          its hunger

Time did not appear long to her
for she walked as far as the sky
             is blue
   as far as the mercy
          of deer

Full of gladness
she wished for a moment
of laughter

   licking at her clothes
with its red tongue

She laughed until her death

 

The above poem is an erasure of Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation of “The Twelve Brothers” from Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm.



Jade Riordan is an Irish-Canadian poet, an undergraduate student at the University of Ottawa, and a selection committee member (poetry reader) with Bywords. Her poetry has appeared in The Blue Nib, Cha, Cordite Poetry Review, L'Éphémère Review, Noble / Gas Qtrly, and elsewhere.
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29 Apr 2024

The Lightning Road cuts far across the Cosmos, a streak of dazzling gold amidst the star-studded void.
daily you suppress it and ride the shame / like a surfer rides a monster wave,
somersaulting in continuous turns
two wolves lope / behind the Atlantic
The thing is; I don’t set out to write neurodivergent characters. I write people – fictional people who are drawn from the people around me, the way I experience the world, and my understanding of these experiences. Too bad if other people refuse to afford my experiences as being real or relatable.
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