Katharyn Howd Machan
January
When he became king,
he married her, of course, his daughter
hidden away for seventeen years
in a forest glamoured by trolls.
She’d learned to knit, to paint, to count
snowflakes, always praying she’d find
one the same as the one before.
No one ever cut her hair;
it hung black down to her ankles
without a ripple, a wave, a curl.
Such a frightening perfect girl!
Deliberately he avoided the place
until all the votes came in.
Then–holy moly–did he gallop at dark,
nodding to her drooling captors,
turning and tossing on his tongue
the name he would give her at last.
Katharyn Howd Machan is the author of 39 poetry collections, most recently A Slow Bottle of Wine (Comstock Review, 2020), winner of the 2019 Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Twyckenham Notes, The Healing Muse, Lascaux Review, Passager, Artemis, and Common Ground Review; and in many anthologies, including A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Books, 2019), edited by Diane Lockward, and Coffee Poems: Reflections on Life With Coffee (World Enough Writers, 2019(), edited by Lorraine Healy. Machan is a professor in the department of writing at Ithaca College, and former director of the national Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops.
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