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Bird Girl
I might as well have wings.
My hands were never good for much.
Whether braiding rugs or bread or my own hair,
my work was lopsided.
The dust in the corners felt safe
watching me wield the broom.
Fumbling. Careless. Such taunts
do not apply to the creature I am now,
one without palms and knuckles
punished by scalding wash water.
In this cage, in this feathered skin,
I am born anew.
I stretch toward the golden bars
and sing.
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Assassin
Once the Red Delicious clears Snow White’s
epiglottis, the wicked queen moves on
to make sure a dozen dancing princesses
do-si-do no more,
to help Sleeping Beauty
find eternal rest,
to plant the foot that fits the slipper
six feet under.
Afternoons are endless meetings with the huntsman
to follow up on rumors: yes,
Gretel is becoming quite a looker,
Bo Peep has lost her baby fat,
Goldilocks has better extensions,
the third little pig was just voted
Cosmo’s Sexiest Ham.
Back home in front of The Late, Late Show,
mixing poisons for tomorrow, she wonders
how long she can maintain this pace.
Is the Fairest’s work never done?
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View from the Balcony
When my sleeve slips past
the black-and-blue patchwork of skin
during my practiced royal wave,
the crowd cheers even louder,
for here’s the proof!
I am the kingdom’s mottled sweetheart
who can feel a single pea like a fist
thrust through the mountain of eiderdown.
The prince hammers a kiss onto my cheek.
I look down into the shadows of the courtyard
and try to spot all the others, so many
real princesses
standing stiffly on the merciless cobblestones.
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Art TK
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Pink Champagne
That night the Platte River prowled outside our tent,
my friends and I flopped inside, a nest of babies,
not quite furless and blind, but barely
fifteen years old. We kept the music low enough
not to raise parental hackles, loud enough to drown
out the pop of the cork and then the shrieks as bubbles
swelled over the banks of the bottle, foamed down
our Dixie Cups the way rapids lathered the rocks
we later floated toward on our backs.
For once we were naked not for the sake of some
guys, but to feel the current swirling between our legs,
lifting up all those parts we had never shown
to the sun and which now glowed brighter
than every awestruck star
and one hell of an envious moon.
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Acknowledgements
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Index of First Lines
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Index of Photographs
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About the Author
CHRISTINE HEPPERMANN has been a reviewer for the New York Times, the Horn Book, and many other publications. She lives in New York. www.christineheppermann.com
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Author’s Note
If you find the dividing line between fairy tales and reality, let me know. In my mind, the two run together, even though the intersections aren’t always obvious. The girl sitting quietly in class or waiting for the bus or roaming the mall doesn’t want anyone to know, or doesn’t know how to tell anyone, that she is locked in a tower. Maybe she’s a prisoner of a story she’s heard all her life—that fairest means best, or that bruises prove she is worthy of love.
But here’s a great thing about stories: they can be retold.
Traditionally, fairy tales appear on the page with male names attached. The Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault get credit for writing them down. Yet as scholars have shown, the original tellers were, in all likelihood, women. And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales—golden eggs, singing harps, talking frogs—worked to mask a deeper purpose. According to folklorist Marina Warner, it made the stories look on the surface like “a mere bubble of nonsense” within which it was possible to “utter harsh truths, to say what you dare” about the state of women’s lives. Because they were just stories, right? Harmless little fantasies?
I have never been particularly brave. But when I put on the mask of fairy tales and started writing these poems, I felt powerful. I felt free to poke around inside stories that scared me or saddened me or made me mad. The more I explored the darkness, the more I realized that the forest only looks impenetrable.
My advice? Retell your own stories. Keep pushing your way through the trees, and I promise that, eventually, you will come to a clearing. And then you can dance.
—Christine Heppermann, New York
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Advance praise for
POISONED
APPLES
“Over and over again, Christine Heppermann’s poems reveal the worm in the messages young women get about love, sex, food, and bodies. These poems cast a harrowing but irresistible disenchantment.”
—Sara Zarr, author of National Book Award finalist Story of a Girl
“Heppermann’s collection of teen angst is like a velvet bag full of gems to be poured out into the palm, held up to the light, studied, and saved to be brought out again and again on fitting occasions.”
—Karen Hesse, author of Newbery Medal–winning Out of the Dust
“The fairy tale path, dirt and cobblestone, weaves through a dark wood. The fast shiny freeway of now zooms past where the woods used to be. Sometimes the path and the freeway intersect. Sometimes they are the same road. Christine Heppermann’s amazing poems come from each of these places. They are moving, mind-bending, sad, and ambivalent poems. But they are also really funny and, in the end, t
riumphant.”
—Lynne Rae Perkins, author of Newbery Medal–winning Criss Cross
“This powerful and provocative exploration of body image, media, and love broke my heart and made me gasp aloud with its relentless truth. Dark, unsettling, and altogether brilliant.”
—Rae Carson, author of New York Times–bestselling The Girl of Fire and Thorns
“Anyone can read these wonderful poems, but I know women and girls especially will open Poisoned Apples and immediately tell their friends, show their friends, loan the book out, get it back, read it again and again until the cover falls off.”
—Ron Koertge, author of the acclaimed Stoner & Spaz
“Christine Heppermann writes with a brilliant wizard’s pen. If redemption comes to us in stunning, sidelong ways, via metaphor, parallel thinking, reshaped tales with new characters who might be us, this is a book that will save. Not only you, but so many people you know. Take a look.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of National Book Award finalist 19 Varieties of Gazelle
“Poisoned Apples is simply phenomenal. Heppermann’s honest voice grabs the reader with urgency. This collection is a champion for teens and adults who see our world as an advertisement for perfection that doesn’t exist. Readers will want to read these poems aloud over and over again.”
—A. S. King, author of Printz Honor book Ask the Passengers
“A bloody poetic attack on the beauty myth that’s caustic, funny, and heartbreaking.”
—E. Lockhart, author of National Book Award finalist The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
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Copyright
POISONED APPLES: Poems for You, My Pretty. Copyright © 2014 by Christine Heppermann. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
TK
14 15 16 17 TK 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition March 2014 ISBN 9780062341549
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