i vowed and vowed and vowed and vowed

my dream costume

all during the months of august, september, and october of 2013

not to get up in the internet's grill about feminism,

mormonism, and all that fraught hot mess.

then i did.

&

it was painful. as i had feared.

&

i'm now in recovery mode.

&

***

so, i'm now going to turn to something that just brings me pure pleasure:

my dream halloween costume.

every year i think to myself:

"lara, next year, surely, you're going to sell a screenplay or get an nea grant, so you can afford to have this snow white's wicked step mother costume custom made. in really expensive fabric.  and it will fit perfectly, ensuring that you never gain weight (because it was so expensive), so you can wear it every halloween until you die.  and maybe even be buried in it."

wouldn't it look great on both a live body and a corpse?

i'm still waiting.

***


i give you the first three stanza's, which i made into a prose poem just for fun, of anne "sexton's snow white and the seven dwarves".  click on the link if you want all nine stanzas plus line breaks (i didn't find them all that useful, personally.)

sexton looking very sextonish

No matter what life you lead the virgin is a lovely number: cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, arms and legs made of Limoges, lips like Vin Du Rhône, rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut. Open to say, Good Day Mama, and shut for the thrust of the unicorn. She is unsoiled. She is as white as a bonefish. Once there was a lovely virgin called Snow White. Say she was thirteen. Her stepmother, a beauty in her own right, though eaten, of course, by age, would hear of no beauty surpassing her own. Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes. The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred-- something like the weather forecast-- a mirror that proclaimed the one beauty of the land. She would ask, Looking glass upon the wall, who is fairest of us all? And the mirror would reply, You are the fairest of us all. Pride pumped in her like poison. Suddenly one day the mirror replied, Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than you. Until that moment Snow White had been no more important than a dust mouse under the bed. But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand and four whiskers over her lip so she condemned Snow White to be hacked to death. Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter, and I will salt it and eat it. The hunter, however, let his prisoner go and brought a boar's heart back to the castle. The queen chewed it up like a cube steak. Now I am fairest, she said, lapping her slim white fingers.