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This article was published 12/04/2016 (2601 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

 

Pearls before Swine

 

The sins of my family have been well-documented:

gluttony, covetousness, child-trafficking,

and refusing to ask for directions

have gained the most notoriety. Which was always

the plan. We knew everyone would believe

the entitled foolishness of teenage girls, an old man’s

weak and selfish acts. And me,

the sacrificing virgin in blue, rotting away

in a French backwater for 16 years, out of books

I hadn’t read six times and men

who didn’t pass their Fridays in a trough

of beer and piss. I was more

Eve than Madonna. I wanted the library,

the grounds, the strange hairy prince. I wanted

the rose, its thorns between my knuckles.

I volunteered to lie down with danger and hold it

in my dainty hands, learning how

far I could push it, teaching it

who was king around here now.

Marika Prokosh is a Winnipeg writer. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, CV2, Lemon Hound, Poetry Is Dead, and The Toast.

 

The Winnipeg Free Press will be running poems by Manitoba poets every weekday in April to celebrate National Poetry Month. The NPM in the WFP Project was edited by Ariel Gordon.