Sleeping Beauty

You’ve never seen a lilac in Mississippi.

Backstage you wear lotion laced with

its chemical imitation. A ballet mistress

says relevé always as command: lift

onto the toe using only the heel.

Your ankle’s bewilderment

old as the horned owl gaze from

your mother hunched in the audience.

You enter the stage as Lilac Fairy

& fairies make critical things happen,

though underneath your tulle brushing

sleep over a kingdom, you’re a mouse

who gets eaten every night.

No audience wants to see that. Not

the barbed feathers tucked in your

mother’s cardigan. If you pretend

rescue is coming, it might.

Relevé meaning rise & also relief.

Lift your head along with the heel.

A boy your mother says is not a boy

follows your pirouettes from the balcony.

Already a wondering, rise to what.

The ballet can’t perform without

fairy tale. The stage is safe for magic,

or at least pretend. Almost everyone gets

a solo in Sleeping Beauty, so no surgeon’s

daughter has hidden your pointe shoes

in the dressing room couch. The boy

was careful not to bring flowers

but you can feel his eyes bending around

the shoulders, clavicle, and neck you forgot

existed. When these minutes end,

these minutes of spinning his eyes

in their own pirouette, the world

won’t allow you to leave in his red Bronco,

not anymore. Already, hope sounds like

the adult word for magic. Relevé

meaning how much choreographed

relief a kingdom tolerates. Already

you are learning the off-stage rules

about who gets rescued. Who throws

flowers, who catches them.