The sisters wear white doeskin dresses and moccasins quilled and beaded, not by their own hands, but by old ladies with fingers toughened by a hundred punctures. They’ll dance through the soles in a single night. This tale has need of a clever young man to find the valley where the twelve sisters go every evening. For this the king will give him the eldest, not knowing how each night she dances with a maiden in dark red lipstick and a dress cut low over her beautiful cleavage.
In some stories the young man needs to be taught a lesson. In some he’s the hero, a son for the king who has only daughters. The lesser suitors try to follow, lose their way and wander. Some will meet the women they should have met who’ll take their names and look both ways before crossing. Some will never get out of the forest. Half mad, they’ll crawl into hollow trees, into caves too damp to build even a small fire lighting nothing
beyond the valley where
I have been
for hours
waiting. like the dancing sisters I remember, nothing Shy and small-hooved, they
scatter at the slightest, stoop to tell them something about dancing The princess who got away, returned, The unheard warnings, the warning heard the number of nights was finite I ask myself when I wake Wouldn’t I go back I say to no one I’d go back into any one Janet McAdams is the author of the poetry collections Buffalo in Six Directions/ Búfalo en seís direcciones, Feral, and The Island of Lost Luggage, which received an American Book Award. Her chapbook of prose poems, Seven Boxes for the Country After, won the Wick Chapbook competition and was published by Kent State University Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, North American Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and Poem-a-Day, among others, and in the anthologies New Poets of Native Nations, Queer Nature, and Essential Queer Voices. She is an emerita professor of Kenyon College, where she held the Robert P. Hubbard Chair in Poetry, and now lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Image: theoutdoorsquest.com Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
When the sisters
come down the trail, they are nothing
like the woman who teaches a young man a lesson.
for a group photo. I had been thinking
but oh their starved
shy smiles—
not a one of them to listen to my sad stories:
only to leave me again.
and unheeded. But who could have known
in the village where no one knows me.
of those nights, even with my unfurred mortal feet,
slipperless and undanced for a decade.
Heavy Feather Review 