Bending and Breaking Lines

This week’s prompt from Read Write Poem is an excellent one. They are prompting us to examine our line breaks and perhaps revise a poem, with attention to the line breaks. They encourage us to either use an imposed form (if that’s not our bag) or alternatively, use free verse if that’s more our style. I love thinking about line breaks and their effect on the sound of the poem, as well as the meaning of the line and the overall poem. Nerdiness ensued this week.

I decided to use this prompt as an opportunity to revise a poem that I felt wasn’t working. So I went through my major overhaul folder and dug up Bedtime Stories, which I wrote as a prose poem for Poetry Thursday. I decided to impose a line length (ten syllables) and a stanza length, so that I could focus my attention on the language and the image. I also tried to integrate my writing group’s critique. I feel it was a good exercise and it felt intuitive, in its own way.

Bedtime Stories

Once upon a time, there was a young girl
who scrubbed stubborn gray ash from her stone bed
and spun silence into silk and cloaked her

heart inside. She only escaped at night.
She frequented all the right places, pearl
white palaces and crowded balls, parties

where no one noticed her homemade dress, where
nobody knew her real name. Once upon
a time, there was a young boy, trapped in hell,

if hell was a party where people snacked
on fish eggs while whispering idle lies.
He saw the girl from across the room, watched

her anonymous smiles. He was deep in
love. We know what happened next. He followed
her home. After dark. Watched her change back to

gray rags, wax the kitchen floor. He was hooked.
Once upon a time, he made a promise,
gave her a pair of glass shoes, delicate

and transparent as dreams. He said, “Baby,
wear these and walk all the way home with me.”
While he wasn’t watching, she put them on.

Here’s what we don’t know. The shoes were so tight
they sliced the skin clean off her heels, layers
of white flesh peeled away. It hurt like hell.

She was afraid of the blood, but she wore
them anyway, hobbled home. She wore them
every day. Every day she watched her skin

whittle down, like an unfolding onion.
She waited for them to fit perfectly,
her second skin. She waited a long time.