Table of Contents

  Introduction
  1. Mapping the Ways
  2. Spinning the Tales
  3. Voices & Viewpoints
  4. Spell Binding &
    Spell Breaking
  5. Magical Objects
  6. Desire & Its Discontents
  7. The Grimm Sisterhood
  8. Variations & Updates
  9. Ever After, Or a Few Years Later
  10. Living the Tales
  About the Authors
  Acknowledgments
  Selected Bibliography
  Index of Poems by Tale
  Index of Authors and Titles
  About the Editors

A N N A    R A B I N O W I T Z

Beauty Sleeping Now

So you wait, so you wait,

One hundred years you trance,
Marrow smoldering in your bones,
While queen and king, commoner
And knight snore decades' snores

And winters turn
And then return
To nothing new.

Silence stokes the great stone halls,
The fire's home is ash, and comatose,
You're dead alive
Until the prince lopes in.

But this time your eyes fly open
Before Charming plants his kiss upon your lips,

And when His Highness bends
To pluck you from your sleep,
Oh, Beauty, how he withers
As you trap his tongue between your teeth.