In the movie The Boy with Green Hair, boys run with scissors. They are in the woods chasing the green-haired boy, determined to relieve him of what makes him different. Or Ryan’s Daughter, where Rosy takes the blame, accepts the punishment for betraying the Irish cause, something she didn’t do, and a town mob shears her to the scalp and strips her of her clothes. All secrets must be exposed, though there are not enough sugar cubes to subdue the long locks of absinthe, and a stringy-mouthed Venus flytrap, sated with hamburger bits instead of the flies it requires, will limp to its death. Time moves like moss for Marie, in Caged, where prison and a forced shaved head turn her into the hardened criminal she never was. Recovery, if it exists, is a tale of length over style, of allowing the copper rain chain all the time it needs to reach its prized patina.

Rapunzel
let down your hair ...
I have the scissors

Marybeth Rua-Larsen’s

poems and flash fiction have appeared in 3Elements Literary Review, Crannóg Magazine, Flash Frontier, Lily Poetry Review, and Magma Poetry, among others. She’s won the 2017 Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2019 in Scotland. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.

Author’s website: https://www.mrualarsen.com