TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

My favorite books as a child were both collections of fairy tales. One was a doorstop-thick hardback, bound in red cloth with gold printing on the cover. I remember it had especially thin, delicate pages and very small print. There weren’t full-page color illustrations, either, just the occasional black spot drawing. All of these details told me it was not really a book for kids, which made me want to read it more.

The other was a 1977 edition of Dean’s A Book of Fairy Tales, illustrated by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone. It was a large book with full-color illustrations, and I remember loving the art as much as the text. I mentioned this book to my literary agent a few years ago, lamenting that I didn’t have it anymore. Not long after that phone conversation, a package arrived: a copy she’d found online and had shipped to my home. I gasped when I opened it and realized what it was. What a gift. It’s as magical as I remember.

Something about fairy tales captured my imagination and captures the imaginations of countless children — probably because, in them, impossible things are possible. Girls become mermaids, and mirrors can tell the future. Birds become boys, and boys become birds. Mountains open with keys, and a kiss can wake you from a century of sleep. 

Not all of the magic in fairy tales is sweet and harmless, either. There are witches and evil queens and wolves that would swallow even a little old grandmother whole. There are good spells and bad spells. There are stories of beautiful transformations and stories of horrific ones. Very few things in fairy tales are what they seem, and that is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Today’s poem draws on the language of fairy tales and the strange, sometimes inexplicable things that happen in these stories. After all, strange, sometimes inexplicable things happen in life, too.

Nursery
by Kiki Petrosino

We opened the door to the fairy house
& took our tea on matching pebble seats.
Somehow we got out of there alive

though something crystalline of us
remains in that dark, growing its facets.
We opened the door to the fairy house

at the oak’s black ankle. You asked 
What could happen? as you disappeared
somehow. We got out of there alive

the strange tea still warm in our bellies.
Inside, our hosts gave damn few answers.
Who built that door? Is this a fairy house?

They had no faces yet. We spoke
into their quince-bud ears. You wept.
Somehow we got out of there alive

though we didn’t quite return. Our life
is different now we’ve drunk the tea.
They’re alive somehow. I got us out.
Why did you open the door to the fairy house?

“Nursery” by Kiki Petrosino from WITCH WIFE © 2016 Kiki Petrosino. Used by permission of Sarabande Books.