Sleeping Beauty, again by Alan Bern

for Anne Sexton

How to kill yourself this time 

You kept wondering in your Thorazine haze

Now after fifty years my once professoressa

I am still afraid to write this 

You were my sad mother too 

Same age as Mom

While you were remaking Grimm 

Mom toured China’s bright new communisms 

But I did want to put my hand there

Your small shapely breasts like my mother’s

Your thin hairless thighs 

And we could have

Though you didn’t like my poems

And I wasn’t sure about yours 

Mom smoked one Kent 

Each week lipstick circles and you

Smoking more and more 

Long fingers slender around the cigarettes 

Still it was you I adopted

Though you had little interest

Pondering Sleeping Beauty again

For another hundred years

*Previously published by DarkWinter Literary Magazine, June 2022 *

About the Poet:

Retired children’s librarian Alan Bern has published three books of poetry and has a hybrid fictionalized memoir, IN THE PACE OF THE PATH, forthcoming from UnCollected Press. Recent awards include: Winner, Saw Palm Poetry Contest (2022); Honorable Mention, Littoral Press Poetry Prize(2021). Recent and upcoming writing and photo work include:CERASUS, Thanatos, The Hyacinth Review, DarkWinter, and Mercurius. Alan is a published/exhibited photographer, and he performs with dancer/choreographer Lucinda Weaver as PACES: dance & poetry fit the space and with musicians from Composing Together. Lines & Faces, his press with artist/printer Robert Woods: linesandfaces.com.