Sarah E. Morin has three great passions in life: God, books, and working with young people. She serves as a kidwrangler at Conner Prairie History Museum in Fishers, Indiana. She writes and performs unruly fairy tales and poems. Her first Christian fantasy novel, Waking Beauty, was published in April 2015. She is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers and a state officer of Poetry Society of Indiana. When she grows up she wants to be a child prodigy. Visit her at sarahemorin.com.
MARILYN UNWRAPPED
The cupcake pleats of your skirts
swirl above the subway grate.
The breeze unwraps vanilla legs.
You stand on your urban cooling rack,
too hot, too sweet, too sinful a mouthful.
But some like it hot.
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,
and you’re frosted, Norma Jean,
glamorous ragamuffin,
decadent dessert fantasy.
A ravenous press
sprinkles you with camera-bulb flashes.
You devour the light, unsated.
Joe cannot get close enough to take a bite.
Your fingers craft the fondant waves of your dress.
You are the feature display in a baker’s window,
Your stacked figure a hollow cardboard form
polished with sugar glaze,
the kind everyone drools over and nobody buys.
Will you lose your balance
in your toothpick heels
as the fabric, a tempting virgin-white,
flaps around your perfect curves?
The plastic bride tumbles from her own cake.
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| Pixabay |
MARILYN UNWRAPPED
The cupcake pleats of your skirts
swirl above the subway grate.
The breeze unwraps vanilla legs.
You stand on your urban cooling rack,
too hot, too sweet, too sinful a mouthful.
But some like it hot.
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,
and you’re frosted, Norma Jean,
glamorous ragamuffin,
decadent dessert fantasy.
A ravenous press
sprinkles you with camera-bulb flashes.
You devour the light, unsated.
Joe cannot get close enough to take a bite.
Your fingers craft the fondant waves of your dress.
You are the feature display in a baker’s window,
Your stacked figure a hollow cardboard form
polished with sugar glaze,
the kind everyone drools over and nobody buys.
Will you lose your balance
in your toothpick heels
as the fabric, a tempting virgin-white,
flaps around your perfect curves?
The plastic bride tumbles from her own cake.
I AM A WOMAN OF MANY COMPLEXITIES
It is my God-given right to change my mind,
a right imbued by estrogen and sass.
Though I am more than a concoction of hormones and spunk.
It is the Creator’s gift to all women.
We see life through multiple perspectives
and amplify the rays through our stained-glass selves.
I am a woman of many complexities.
I am two strong, tapered arms,
draped, bound, decorated
in beads and chains,
pressed glass, Celtic knotwork,
held together by elastic will.
And if you try to rattle me out,
separate one bent gem from the other,
you will capture but one dot in my Georges Seurat personality.
I am a woman of many complexities.
My thumbs yearn to pop your male bubble-wrap mind.
where the air stays sealed up tight
never flowing from cell to cell.
Your transparent uniformity may, for a time, protect me.
But I am a jewel of a thousand facets.
Hold me up to the light and study the prisms I create.
I am a woman of many complexities.
It is my God-given right to change my mind,
a right imbued by estrogen and sass.
Though I am more than a concoction of hormones and spunk.
It is the Creator’s gift to all women.
We see life through multiple perspectives
and amplify the rays through our stained-glass selves.
I am a woman of many complexities.
I am two strong, tapered arms,
draped, bound, decorated
in beads and chains,
pressed glass, Celtic knotwork,
held together by elastic will.
And if you try to rattle me out,
separate one bent gem from the other,
you will capture but one dot in my Georges Seurat personality.
I am a woman of many complexities.
My thumbs yearn to pop your male bubble-wrap mind.
where the air stays sealed up tight
never flowing from cell to cell.
Your transparent uniformity may, for a time, protect me.
But I am a jewel of a thousand facets.
Hold me up to the light and study the prisms I create.
I am a woman of many complexities.
EULOGY FOR A SLINKY
Today I found a dead Slinky,
metal tangled and splayed,
its broken neck contorted into a knot.
It died in a front lawn on Conner Street.
Its limp tail
(or perhaps its head)
brushed the cracked desert plains of the sidewalk.
Blades of grass poked through its corpse.
I took a picture, close up like Georgia O’Keefe.
The razor sun stripped the flesh from its skeleton
until it glinted there, stark and naked,
a curving ribcage of a single silver bone.
How long had it lain there?
Was it the fossil of a prehistoric caterpillar?
Was it a pet Slinky that stretched out
to warm its old body in the August sun
and died in its sleep?
But its spine pretzeled in the throes of a violent death
as though a monotonous summer vacation drove children to cruelty.
What young emperor cast it out?
For what crimes was it banished from the toy box?
Could this metal gymnast no longer cartwheel down stairs?
Maybe it limped, so the family put it out to pasture,
and there it died of neglect.
Or had the Slinky slipped the safe confines of the yard of its own accord,
and become roadkill to a speeding tricycle?
Was some child excavating under the bed in search of it?
Would anyone think of it, until the lawnmower discovered it?
Would anyone mourn this casualty of summer break?
I like to think its last word was “velveteen.”
Today I found a dead Slinky,
metal tangled and splayed,
its broken neck contorted into a knot.
It died in a front lawn on Conner Street.
Its limp tail
(or perhaps its head)
brushed the cracked desert plains of the sidewalk.
Blades of grass poked through its corpse.
I took a picture, close up like Georgia O’Keefe.
The razor sun stripped the flesh from its skeleton
until it glinted there, stark and naked,
a curving ribcage of a single silver bone.
How long had it lain there?
Was it the fossil of a prehistoric caterpillar?
Was it a pet Slinky that stretched out
to warm its old body in the August sun
and died in its sleep?
But its spine pretzeled in the throes of a violent death
as though a monotonous summer vacation drove children to cruelty.
What young emperor cast it out?
For what crimes was it banished from the toy box?
Could this metal gymnast no longer cartwheel down stairs?
Maybe it limped, so the family put it out to pasture,
and there it died of neglect.
Or had the Slinky slipped the safe confines of the yard of its own accord,
and become roadkill to a speeding tricycle?
Was some child excavating under the bed in search of it?
Would anyone think of it, until the lawnmower discovered it?
Would anyone mourn this casualty of summer break?
I like to think its last word was “velveteen.”
© Sarah E. Morin
