as a child I couldn’t sleep
my parents tried ignoring me holding me
stroking fingers down my back
but still I cried into the winter nights
coyotes howled first one call a raindrop
and then a whole storm
of their chorus they’re hunting
a deer my father said
to make me sleep he told stories
about a possum who loved
a persimmon I did not know
it was a jewel of a fruit
that grew somewhere golden warm
I later found the book and realized
he hadn’t made up the stories for me
and must have read them as a child
when he lived in a place
with a different kind of coldness
now each night he lets in the new cat
because bears stalk the woods
and then he reads himself to sleep
while my mother knits a sweater
I once read the book but remember only
where it overlapped the shores of his
sleepless stories there was a possum
who loved persimmons his name
was Jim one time he was trapped in a tree
I try to recall the rest but it’s lost
to those long nights I don’t know why
I couldn’t sleep my thoughts maybe
were clotted with worries
I couldn’t yet have known
outside screech owls enacted murders
I’ve still never tasted a persimmon
I imagine it tastes like dawn
About The Author
Jaime Zuckerman
Jaime Zuckerman is the author of two chapbooks, Letters to Melville (Ghost Proposal, 2018) and Alone in this Together (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) as well as recent or forthcoming poems Diode, Forklift: Ohio, Foundry, Thrush, Vinyl and other journals. She serves as the poetry editor of Redivider, the art director for Sixth Finch, and a senior reader for Ploughshares. She grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston, MA.
Fairy tales are misunderstood as romantic, magical stories with happy endings. However, for every princess success story, there’s a monster, a brutal murder, an orphaned child. The world of fairy tales is just as dark and unpredictable as our real world. Though people assume their audience is children, fairy tales are more often for adults reckoning with a world that is violent and unfair. The characters that survive to “happily ever after” are the moral and resilient ones–the ones who maintain their integrity, no matter what cruelty the world throws at them, the ones willing to trick a witch into her own oven. I believe fairy tales offer us a vision for ethical and emotional strength in the face of a world that is randomly cruel and violent
