by Monica Wang
—halfway through a dream the woman, not a girl, awakes alone
in the castle where her people droop like cut blooms forgotten
in a glass. Beauté departs, walks through nettles and woods
not knowing adventuring is homecoming, not knowing
fairytales enough to guess what happens next.
The cold King says she's been too sad for far too long
as she tastes an unknown amanita in tall, half-sinister grass
though he accompanies her past possible opium fields, beyond
where plantlife grows. Women who resemble her draw him away
to an un-greenhouse, its flowers wrong scents and opposite colours.
The figure cloaked in light feeds her the sweetest bitter almond
words in a palace in the air. He offers his home, with women
as her stepsisters. The offer not a draught but witched apple
blossom (Drink me, it beckons)—she crushes its coolness
between the pearls in her teeth, burning her throat.
She expands as rings of petals unfurl at the ball
she dances until the clock strikes; she wins the crown
of delirious snow white petalled datura & witch velvet black
belladonna & pre-nightsky delphinium & gown-as-bright-as-the-sun
rhododendron & amidst arsenic green ivy, the pale—dark—gleaming
bells ringing to herald a funeral and a kiss, ascension and coronation
she throws her flowers to the crowd, her own toxic blood
half-remembering, then, this isn't the end she dreamt.
Art by Martine Nguyen
MONICA WANG has fiction in Electric Lit, Three Crows Magazine, Southword, etc. In 2021 she received a scholarship to MA Creative Writing at University of Exeter. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, she grew up in Taipei and Vancouver, Canada, and spent the past four years in Germany & the Netherlands.
Her flower crown doesn't contain edible flowers can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 4.2.
