Queen – Lexie Reese

Work Part I

10 years old

She braids her dancing spirals smooth
With fingers holding memory.
Handmade heart.
Her mother’s eyes a summary:
To bend, to weed, to wash, to reach
That perfect peach
Beyond the grace of patchwork smiles
Whose pink suffuses laundry carts;
Infinite piles,
Their centers drift and sag apart.

Yet once she rinses all her miles
Of tattered heart, red dye releases.

And then the fraying all but ceases.

Work part II

10 years old

She stops to grasp a thousand hands
That wave green gloved hellos
From the earth. Then pulls them fresh
Out of entangled dirt. She stands, And creamy bulbs extend
From the sugar plants. Her hair
Holds sun-breathed photons—
White exhales—on each strand.

She is reaching—nearly there
all her fingers touching sky.

Princess III

10 years old

Adorned with crowns, from in her dreams
Of plastic gems and ribbons gleaming;
With loving moms, they fill each aisle,
Those little girls with royal smiles.
And they are budding pink and teeming
With praise for each freckle that piles
On and on their plum silk cheeks.
And their pearl tipped nails say care and matter.

She is searching shelves for each banana
Bouquet, plastic bags in both her hands,
While the soft smells bananas leave
Fill her with hush and rest. Warm words,

For other’s ears, can in her burn.
Her heart is lost in chest: to matter.
The words—they rise like breath.

Queen IV

55 years old

She wraps each girl in linen heart
She spun and wove herself. They tilt
Like grass in all its chlorophyll,
With smiles that gild their lips
Like crowns. Moth-colored lashes part
The air, and comb strands from each spurt
Of dandelion laughs that spill
Their cellulose in whitish trills;
They feather in the wind like clouds.

She is Queen of forgotten hearts: proud
To gather wandering and chilled
Attempters of light; her arms have raised kingdoms
Far above themselves, on gold hills

Soft as baby hair. And marvelous
As gems, wings of milk-white all display
Butterfly scales. Abiding. Still.

Lexie R. Reese is an undergraduate at Utah State University majoring in English and Communication Disorders. She has been published in Buckoff Magazine, Edify Fiction, Sink Hollow Magazine, Red Fez Magazine and Peacock Journal.