THE MAGIC BIRD
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LET ME TELL YOU
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NAT FAY
THE MAGIC BIRD I can only find the story of the three sorceresses in a wikipedia article about shapeshifting. I type: 3 mares sorceresses and sorceresses that tried to murder a man turned into black mares and the magic bird fairy tale three sorceresses are turned into horses. Sourceless. If the story had footprints, they would be the color of ice cubes in the night. I try to gather water from the melting ice to make something out of—a perfume scented with hay and sweat and yarrow, or a pale soup—but I can’t gather fast enough, it evaporates. The young sorceresses were turned into mares by a man they tried to murder and once turned they were forced to carry heavy burdens. I want to know more about the sorceresses because I want to know something about mares and what type of person told this story so that someone else could tell it, the mares carrying their burdens from one mouth to the next, perched on the pink tongues like wrong birds. What burdens? Anvils, rocks, ant hills, rutabagas, or locks locking nothing but each other. The internet is a huge mouth with a billion teeth dropping like snow. Later I get ads recommended to me: mare care–make sure your estate is divided equally, Keep Your Mares Safe In Your Yard, This hidden secret in the US stops Mare Burdens, 18 ingredients to cook with instead of sorceresses. The next morning I find a horseshoe on my tongue. It dissolves like salt. LET ME TELL YOU
I heard from the tilberi of the girl who sells eels and bootleg CDs of Vespertine that the beds are hungry. That the beds are eating girls whole. Flies stuck to butterwort leaves. A filigree of hair left behind. I heard from the housekeeper with the silver tooth that there is a lady who goes by the name of the Marquise de Rambouillet who has spent baskets of coins on a show bed that lures maids to make it and eats them, spitting out their bones in splinters to be sold to collectors. I heard from the wife of the milkmaid whose nails are clean enough to eat off of that the beds are resting girls to death, pulling the breath out of their throats, leeching their words clear, gone hollow and see-through as glass, found behind the headboard and sold to collectors. The white lamb called Tyttey told me that sick girls are getting bed-sutured, stuck like melted sugar to Burned flesh. The far-sighted coffin maker who lives behind the sneaker factory is coming up with ways to keep the beds on our side: St. Brigid's cross beneath our pillows, sleeping with scythes, smearing feces and writing tags in silver marker on our front doors. Segolene and I walk home and watch as the doors of the city are charmed with words and waste that catch the glow of planes passing, and sometimes, when the lights of the city are low, the glamor of a cold moon. |
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NAT FAY is a poet. They currently work as an assistant librarian and read fairy tales behind the desk.
/// To Be Kaleidoscoped is to french kiss a stained glass window. It is to seraphim light into a locket. You know it if you find yourself looking to draw connections between swans and hot wax. It is making patterns out of all the stones you find on the side of the highway. /// Gossip is on the lips of everyone who is the enemy of information, of dominant structures, of power, of capital. It is the language of the not-believed, of fairy tales, of translation, of prophecy, and of poets. It is blushing, and whispering, and yelling in streets, and making sweaters, and posting on internet forums. Like anything, gossip was born. First it was christened godsibb, meaning god parent, until it was relegated to the realms of women who assisted at births, and then women who talked together, and so became something widely regarded as evil. Poets and makers are good gossips because, like gossip, poetry exists in the arena of not-information, of spells, and murk, and ritual. It is ghostly and unknowable and familiar and true. |