Sleeping Beauty (Sun and Moon)

Abstract

Sleeping Beauty (Sun and Moon) Nina Pelaez (bio) Don’t you dare say that I’m lucky;I never asked to wake up.The dreaming was incredible:in one, I was a bird of preyfeeding from the bodies of two lambs,in the other, a thorn forced deepunderneath his fingernail. They say a tree that’s ripe with fruitis always for the taking: inert,inanimate, he left me to beartheir wrinkled bodies’ weightsnared to my bare belly, bothbreasts suckled dry by those bastards’greedy mouths. You want me to say I kept them, weaned them,called them darling names—but I’d rather be the villain,sharpening my claws,thinking of how sweet I tasted,picked clean betweentheir monstrous little teeth. [End Page 51] Nina Pelaez NINA PELAEZ is a poet, art historian, and visual artist. Her writing has appeared in Goblin Fruit, The Cider Press Review, and Small Craft Warnings, among other journals. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Bennington College. One of my earliest memories as a child is of my mother reading me Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Ballad of the Harp Weaver.” Millay’s poem, like many traditional fairy tales, equates feminine goodness with unconditional maternal love and unquestioned self-sacrifice. After revisiting earlier versions of the story best known as “Sleeping Beauty”—including Giambattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia”—where the narrative of sexual assault is unabashedly explicit, albeit highly romanticized, I wanted to shift the story’s patriarchal binary of good and evil. As a survivor and the daughter of survivors, “Sleeping Beauty (Sun and Moon)” seeks to give voice to the often unspoken complexities of maternal ambivalence, anger, and discontent in the aftermath of sexual trauma. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press, Leonard N. Simons Building