After sex,
she straightens her stockings
then reapplies her lipstick
and as she rolls down the tube,
she feels a phantom, a ghost curling up inside her chest
She remembers before they – no, further back
she remembers the wardrobe,
the fur coats frizzing in the cold air like they
were alive
the smell of pine,
the way the arrows felt between her fingers
the way she’d pluck her bow,
blood curdling on her hands as she’s pull the
arrows out of the animals she’d killed
She remembers growing up,
growing taller
The crowns getting smaller and smaller
She remembers falling out of the wardrobe,
only to be a child again
in the dimmed Christmas lights, she sits and smokes
waiting for him to wake,
this bloke she picked up at a party
This is her world now
without brothers and sisters
Someone once said
they would always be king and queen
but now she’s just a woman
living in a grey-colored flat
with too many books on her shelf
She lives on tea and cigarettes,
the open mouthed kisses that come
Sometimes when she has an extra quid,
she buys Turkish delight
but it feels heavy against her tongue
the powdered sugar freezes on her lips
The feeling passes, so she exhales
The boy in her bed wakes
and she pulls her jumper back on
She wants to call him Aslan
but she doesn’t know why
Rachel Cathleen Stewart
Rachel Cathleen Stewart holds a B.A. in English: Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Her poems have appeared in Soft Cartel, Tigershark, Sequoya Review, Mannequin Envy, Poems Niederngasse, Unlikely Stories, and Slow Trains Literary Journal. Her non-fiction prose has appeared on XOJane.
Artwork: Caryn Drexl, Layered Down
Website: http://www.caryndrexl.com/
Gingerbread House Lit Mag 