Sleeping Beauty, again for Anne Sexton by Alan Bern

Sleeping Beauty, again

for Anne Sexton

How to kill yourself this time

You kept wondering in your Thorazine haze

Now after fifty years my once professoressa

I am still afraid to write this

You were my sad mother too

Same age as Mom

While you were remaking Grimm

Mom toured China’s bright new communisms

But I did want to put my hand there

Your small shapely breasts like my mother’s

Your thin hairless thighs

And we could have

Though you didn’t like my poems

And I wasn’t sure about yours

Mom smoked one Kent

Each week lipstick circles and you

Smoking more and more

Long fingers slender around the cigarettes

Still it was you I adopted

Though you had little interest

Pondering Sleeping Beauty again

For another hundred years

Alan Bern, a recently retired children’s librarian, is a poet, storywriter, and photographer with two books of poetry from Fithian Press: No no the saddest (2004) and Waterwalking in Berkeley (2007). His third book of poetry, greater distance (2015), was published by his press, Lines & Faces, a fine press and publisher specializing in illustrated poetry broadsides, collaborating with the artist/printer Robert Woods, linesandfaces.com. IN THE PACE OF THE PATH is Alan’s first full-length hybrid of poetry, prose, and photos, forthcoming from UnCollected Press. Recent awards include: Winner, Saw Palm Poetry Contest (2022); Flash Fiction Finalist, Ekphrastic Sex (2021); and Winner, Littoral Press Poetry Prize (2015). Recent and upcoming writing and photo work in: Haunted Waters Press, Feral, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, and swifts & slows: a quarterly of crosscrossings. Alan is also a published/exhibited photographer and a performer with dancer/choreographer Lucinda Weaver as PACES and with musicians from Composing Together.