Ava Leavell Haymon
The
Riddle
Trying once again to produce
a butter cream—cool room, cool
crockery, wooden spatula, wooden spoon—
the girl forgot the witch and imagined
the taste in the boy’s mouth.
Under her hands she felt the sugar
relinquish its crystal grit
without dissolving, and the butter,
without melting, relax its waxy
resistance. Butter and sugar
disappeared, and there it was
at last—the smooth paste, neither solid
nor liquid, somewhere in between.
Keep your fingers out! Hard slap,
like the stepmother’s.
Gretel’s blazing cheek asked a new question:
What if I try hard enough? Learn everything?
Without taking a single taste, produce the
cake
that makes the boy smile and grow fat?
Then she roasts Hansel in the fire
and dances all night in her dark garden.
I’ll be the only child here and no use to her
alive. The spoon was lifting
butter cream, perfect and undeniable.
Gretel’s grip loosened, and the spoon swung
sideways like the needle of a compass.
There is something more, she thought:
something the witch will never teach me.
A riddle of kitchens, so plain
I can’t see it, the answer lodged
physical as gristle in the riddle itself.
Her wrist dropped,
spoon plopped into bowl.
Perfect apprentice, heroine girl,
the complete cook must learn to kill.
The
First Wish
Knowing the sugar house
dangerous, even evil, Gretel walked
toward it. After long enough in the woods,
any house of your own kind seems a shelter.
They had seen dens, lair, deer huddles,
small round nests of finches.
An adult might think these sweet,
her eyes go soft when she fumbles
onto little wads of flannel and hay
the brown mouse lays down in the firewood
or a cocoon webbed soft to a stem in the
weeds.
But a child, her hands chapped and cold,
a child without a mother has no luxury
of sentiment—finding such things,
she sees only the eggs she might eat
if she's desperate enough by that time,
or the return of another female
to run at her with claws or slapping wings.
The smell of baking paralyzed
Gretel’s good sense, fondant
congealing from clear to snow,
a house cooking itself up
before her eyes, because her eyes
fixed on it. Hansel, in his headlong way,
had crashed through the willow break
at the clearing’s edge, grabbing for candy
curlicues, yelling out her name.
One step, another, her face slackening
into a baby’s. Houses could be warmth,
could be safety, company, soft dry beds.
But this one was food.
The first wish.
Food.
Everygirl’s
Mandala
First, a large gold circle on the page,
drawn freehand. Someone told her to begin
that way, and Gretel is nothing
if not obedient. Inside the circle,
she draws a lopsided cube, brown,
adds a roof on top, triangle and plane:
a little house, a gingerbread house.
And Gretel feels its pull
on a hungry child, the bite of her own desire
for sweets, forbidden sweets. She smudges
white over red for peppermint shingles,
and the house begins to hiss: No recipe
will ever satisfy this desire. Its name,
shame, the ultimate
disobedience, fat.
Her breathing shallow, Gretel draws stick
bodies
with circle heads, wobbling away from her
along gingersnap stepping stones.
The twin children are a surprise,
like pleated paper, scissor-cut,
unfolding all at once into paper dolls.
Above their heads, Gretel scribbles
massed leaves, ponderous tree trunks.
Thick roots lower a great bulk
down past the circle, purple darkens
the sky. The gold circle
is almost gone. Gretel’s secret:
sugar melted to dark brown,
butter stirred in, and she, bent over
the kitchen counter lightheaded,
nauseated, mood shuffling from stupid
to cranky, no trace in sink or refrigerator.
Gretel blackens the inside edge of a shadow
and wonders: Where is the witch?
Inside the house looking out? Hiding behind
trees,
cackling under her breath that her bait has
attracted
its prey? Is she in the sky somehow, sailing
back
from who knows where to witness this arrival?
And then Gretel sees her—her two eyes
are the round heads of the lost children,
her jagged nose line cuts through
the hands they hold tight. Below that,
the last curve of gold smirks into a mouth.
Gretel squeezes the red crayon in her fist,
stabs preschooler zigzags for teeth.
She squints and sees all the rest—
black eyebrows bristle desperate auras
above the little heads, coarse hair flails
out past the edge of the page.
Gretel blinks:
Two pictures float without touching.
The first one sketchy, a house
in the woods, red-pink peppermints
smeary on the roof, lost girl and boy.
The second, in hard distinct lines,
a witch’s face hanging free,
stark as a wire mobile twisting
on its string. That face, swinging
on its own—is it looking in at the children,
clutching each other and tottering forward
on stiff little legs? Gretel can see it that
way,
see through the back of the witch’s head
to the scene unfolding in the clearing,
to the children she planned to cook and eat.
But Gretel knows that’s false. It’s drawn
the way anyone draws a face, even a smiley
face
on a dusty table. Those eyes boring crazy
out the backs of the children’s coin-round
heads,
squiggle of scarlet at the corner
The witch is looking straight out at her.
