Maryann Corbett
Storybook Ghazal
These fairy tales—aren’t they addressed to you?
Don’t all these seasonal myths present strange tests to you?
Everywhere, discord. Goddesses on screens
bicker and pout and lift half-covered breasts to you.
In farmers’ markets now, the new-crop apples—
polished, tart-tongued—are pandering their zest to you.
Stepmother-queens whose selfies hiss hard truths—
should you accept the poisoned fruit they’ve pressed on you?
Windfall crabapples rot here in the grass,
wasp-haunted waste, fragrant desire professed to you.
The rat race rolls its apples in your path.
You knew their gold was false, yet it arrested you.
Some snake’s always involved, some old deceit.
Sin glisses back through the leaves but has infested you.
It’s gods who think the cruelest curses up:
the fruit they let you have tastes second-best to you.
That core, bitten? Part of your swallow now:
Lump in the throat. Perpetual bequest to you.
Maryann Corbett is the author of five books, most recently In Code (Able Muse, 2020). Her work has appeared widely in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Rattle, Ecotone, and the Los Angeles Review of Books in the US and the Dark Horse and PN Review in the UK. Her poetry has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Poetry Foundation website, and was included in The Best American Poetry 2018. Her sixth book, The O in the Air, is forthcoming in 2023 from Colosseum Books.