Dear Readers, I have a dear friend who has spent the last few years becoming completely immersed in ballet, and she has inspired me too – I haven’t seen Sleeping Beauty yet, but have Giselle, the Nutcracker and, most recently, Mary Queen of Scots by the Scottish National Ballet under my belt. I see the people on stage as the most superb athletes and artists – they make ballet look so easy that I sometimes forget how difficult it is. And what goes through the heads of the dancers? I love this poem by K.Iver, a non-binary trans poet from Mississippi. See what you think…

Sleeping Beauty

By K. Iver

You’ve never seen a lilac in Mississippi.
Backstage you wear lotion laced with
its chemical imitation. A ballet mistress
says relevé always as command: lift
onto the toe using only the heel.
Your ankle’s bewilderment
old as the horned owl gaze from
your mother hunched in the audience.
You enter the stage as Lilac Fairy
& fairies make critical things happen,
though underneath your tulle brushing
sleep over a kingdom, you’re a mouse
who gets eaten every night.
No audience wants to see that. Not
the barbed feathers tucked in your
mother’s cardigan. If you pretend
rescue is coming, it might.
Relevé meaning rise & also relief.
Lift your head along with the heel.
A boy your mother says is not a boy
follows your pirouettes from the balcony.
Already a wondering, rise to what.
The ballet can’t perform without
fairy tale. The stage is safe for magic,
or at least pretend. Almost everyone gets
a solo in Sleeping Beauty, so no surgeon’s
daughter has hidden your pointe shoes
in the dressing room couch. The boy
was careful not to bring flowers
but you can feel his eyes bending around
the shoulders, clavicle, and neck you forgot
existed. When these minutes end,
these minutes of spinning his eyes
in their own pirouette, the world
won’t allow you to leave in his red Bronco,
not anymore. Already, hope sounds like
the adult word for magic. Relevé
meaning how much choreographed
relief a kingdom tolerates. Already
you are learning the off-stage rules
about who gets rescued. Who throws
flowers, who catches them.