The Frog-Prince
In dreams and sex, those reverent states,
I feel the creature under my skin:
a green muscularity
arcing across
air to pond
a slick of skin slicing the wet
membrane between worlds,
the water's meniscus yielding
the throb all mouth and hunger,
dive and damp,
throat wide in courtship
I live in curse's doubling consciousness,
under water and sky's echoed bowl.
A thimbled crown toppled from my head.
I rose from a green squat, a wet sheen.
But I live in flashes: the slip-splash, the green
above-below, the blue around-above.
There are fairytales never translated,
of a different estrangement and return.
My princess flashes her teeth, the diamond
I put on her hand. Those shape-shifter lips.
About the Author
Amy Beveridge is a pediatric speech-language pathologist and graduate student in rhetoric and writing in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work has been published in Red Ogre Review, Abandoned Mine, Heron Tree and bosque.