“Fairytale” was written shortly after I had given birth to my son. My body was feeling particularly disconnected from the stories I had grown up learning in a fundamentalist Christian household. So I used the poem to turn towards the myths that I was learning for the first time—the ancient Irish myths—where Morrigu, goddess of war, appears as a crow, and the symbol of the salmon is part of their creation stories about how poets gain inspiration. But entering the myths felt overwhelming, so I wrote the poem as a fairytale. This genre helped me invite more playfulness and would allow me to communicate with the myths while also centering the ordinary details of my childhood. Fairytales are told to children to stir their imagination but also include scary bits. I wanted this tension between the scary and the imaginative game-play so I could foresee a future in which my body was healed again. I’m grateful the poem has found a home at Carmina Magazine: Mythology for the Modern Day (2026).
