You and I and the Fairy Dust

(Those who criticize Cinderella are always wrong.
Love is never an escape.
Nor is it deus ex machine.
As untamed as it is benevolent, Cinderella found upon loving the prince that at least the floors she scrubbed had been predictable.
Which is not to say she wished again for drudgery, but only that love was a labyrinth, enigmatic, a challenge and wonder all its own.
Love did not rescue Cinderella.
Upon engaging in love Cinderalla had the responsibility and the work of saving and recreating herself.
The difference is that this time someone shared her toil with her.)
Which is to say, loving you, though an incomparably beautiful experience has nearly killed me.

Orange Like That

At the first eighth of the orange we are back in Mexico and for a moment it's peaceful, the fields look like a verdant sea and she can pretend her life is not vendable, her health and her hands have no price attached. I, unborn, am watching her as she hands the orange to me and I pry seeds from the messy flesh that stings my papercuts. This is before they spray the DDT.
At the second eighth we are reminded about the colors of a huipil, her sister in Guatemala who breathed poison so others could eat bananas, Josefina, Ofelia, Heriberto, the names of children poison will never allow her to conceive.
The third eighth she rips from the fruit reminds her of live-in days in San Diego, (the lovely zoo where she took her three young charges). Back home, she wasn't allowed to eat la jefa's fruit, its too expensive she said, even for the woman who loved her children by proxy, but never as much as she would come to love me.
At the fourth eighth we veer towards father whom she met at Mass in a horrid orange suit, (but oh, weren't those the times, and he remains so beautiful.) He made her fearful not as men are rumored to do but because she feared for his heart, so soft it could be pulled apart at any dueno's whim like the tenuous eights of an orange.
Now my father can speak, we are at the fifth eighth and how his heart survived its sale under overpasses and in the backs of trucks on the way to pick the orchards of the people who persecuted him for being illegal. Though he believed La Virgin would appear next to him one day in the boughs to give him a blessing, she didn't, yet she sent her daughter, my mother.
The sixth eighth makes us silent, we have said nearly everything we can bear to say about the metronome of chores, and we do not wish to speak about the cancer that spreads through her body like a spring of orange blossoms. All the beauty in her life, save me and Papi has been for someone else, her nightmares ensured the viability of other peoples dreams.
On the seventh eighth I think how I will not let them put roses on her grave, roses grown in Ecuador by women so full of pesticide their limbless children fall prematurely from their wombs and no one can afford flowers for the graves.
Now the ignominious "eighth," bulging freakishly from the sphere, pesticide born ninth eighth, strange like how Mayan women don't know how to not wear bright colors, even when being sacrificed, strange like El Negro, el padre, from Georgia who says his people used to sing in the cotton fields because black people didn't know how to quiet their song. Strange like how Mayans, Blacks don't know how to give up even when being given up, he says, they harbor freakish hope among horror. I eat the last eighth, the sun flesh salty with tears.

Shannon J. Prince is a creative writing major and junior at Dartmouth College. In addition to writing, she is an activist for indigenous and African issues, a ceramics maker, and a travel addict. She has been published in Frodo's Notebook, Falcon Wings, KUHF magazine, Imprint, Rice University's Writers in the Schools Magazine, Illogical Muse, Damn Good Writing, Lost Beat Poetry, Haggard and Halloo, Houston Literary Review, Words on Paper, Bewildering Stories, The Smoking Poet, Muscadine Lines, Ragand, Prick of the Spindle, International Zeitschrift, Conceit Magazine, Snow Monkey, Paradigm, Words Myth, and The Green Muse. She also won Dartmouth's Thomas Ralston Prize for creative writing.

Email: Shannon J. Prince

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