by Jasmine Sawers

She is gathering flowers/picking berries/singing songs. She is beautiful/plain/clever/ordinary.

The wolf/the witch/the wind swallows the girl. She cleaves her captor in two and steps out. She slips into a sealskin/donkeyskin/goatskin and is a girl no longer. She is the pastoral backdrop. She is chewing cud. She is elevator music.

She steals into the ice palace/the castle/her father’s home. She weeps hot tears/eats fresh apples/clasps worn hands. She shucks the animal hide. Drips blood on the floor.

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow whose fiction appears in such journals as Ploughshares, The Asian American Writers’ Workshop The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Their first collection, The Anchored World, is forthcoming from Rose Metal Press this fall. They serve as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis.