spiderweb salon's celebration of national poetry month continues with a lovely prose poem and prompt by our dear friend and regular contributor, Leah Tieger. enjoy, and don't miss out on seeing Leah and many other fantastic poets perform at our POETRY PARTY on april 22!
The Princess Explains Herself
I’ve got a table with everything eaten and the dishes have never been cleared. Magpies bring me their shine and I make them a nest. Birds are drawn to a magic that wakes into body, my body, I am my own spell. I am my own beast in my own castle and I am waiting for your kiss. Scales fall and fall from my skin. I tell the story of wolves and dwarves and huntsmen, and when I tell it, I am my own prince. I start with a shoe made of glass. I start once upon once, upon once before that. I pay my way with seafoam. I pay with a heart removed from its chest. I know there’s a cost for every creature. Where there is a princess, there is a witch, and where the wolf goes, the girl goes too. She is eaten and then she escapes. She flees in a carriage, bites an apple, pricks her finger. She sleeps in a case made of glass, dreams a feast with wine so dark she sees her face my face inside it. I see my mouth. It opens. It swallows.
Leah's prompt: write a short poem, roughly 3 to 10 lines about an emotion. Now do the same about a place. Now do the same about a person. Combine them in a non-linear manner, as if you were weaving a fabric.
Leah Tieger scribbles things down in notebooks and tries to make sense of them later. She spends most of her time working or being in grad school. When she's not doing those things, she's reading poems around Dallas or Denton and putting on poetry shows with the coolest people she knows. She lives in a house with twenty-five windows, her neighbor's errant chickens, and a dog who no longer thinks it's weird when she reads the same line out loud over and over until it sounds good.
leah tieger at spiderwed salon | photo by leah jones | may 2016
love what's going on here? come back for more tomorrow (and throughout april!) and be sure to check out the poets we've already featured this month: Stevie Edwards, Logen Cure, Joe Milazzo, and Sean Enfield. & it's true: we're still seeking poet & writer friends to feature here for the month of april (and to join us at our POETRY PARTY) - deadline is on april 10 and you can find submission information HERE.