Amy Cornell is a local freelance writer in Bloomington, Indiana. Pre-covid, Amy co-led writing circles with incarcerated women at the Monroe County Corrections Center, and creative writing and memoir circles for Women Writing for (a) Change of Bloomington. Amy writes poetry, creative non-fiction, novels, blog posts, book reviews, short stories, and loves to hear other women tell stories both real and imagined. Every April she participates in the National Poetry Writing Month Challenge of writing a poem a day for 30 days. These are some of those poems.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Amy, what poems have you brought for us today?

"I have always enjoyed exploring characters from other points of view."  (Amy Cornell)

Happy’s Tale

We always resented being called dwarves.
Most of us were of normal height
Doc actually hit about 5’6”
And when he went out in his lift shoes
Sneezy could ride all the rides with ease.

One tabloid was looking for an angle--
a reason why this beautiful woman
heir to a throne even-would chose to live
in the woods, away from all that, as housemaid
to seven unshaven men.

“Oh look, they’re little people,” one producer said.
And so began this horrifying journey
where everyone talked about our size: our size
in relation to the she-woman, our tiny beds, our tiny shoes,
our tiny selves. Never have seven men been so
diminished all to help make sense of
what, teen angst? Domestic violence? Food
Poisoning?

We loved her though. We did. Grumpy
always was less grumpy, Bashful walked
around in his underwear, didn’t think
twice when she was there. She
overlooked Sleepy’s horrible apnea,
and never believed Dopey was the slow one-
he simply came from a place
where the rules were different.

And contrary to popular opinion she did
not make all our beds while we worked.
We made our own beds, thank you.
But before, when she was here, before
that damn prince, and all the short jokes,
and bad apples, when it was only
us, we did sing a lot.

She could really belt out a tune.
Doc and I could harmonize
like nobody’s business. Sleepy wailed
on the drums and Bashful on the bass.
That should have been the story.
Long nights of jamming, with those
long clear notes sounding above the trees.
That really should have been what they reported.

Big Bad and the Littles

C Lupus here—I always laugh when they call me this.
Big bad. Big bad. I have this rep around the hood.
Big bad. Well have you seen the three littles lately?
The three littles could easily flatten one old big bad me.

One of those bad boys, wittle ittle piggies that
everyone’s always worried about,
weigh about 700 lbs each—
that’s like almost 10 of me.
They’re so fat they can barely move.
I have more interesting prey to prey upon.
Little pigs indeed. Puh-lease.

And that redhead girl? The one who I am allegedly always
threatening to eat that says I have big eyes?
Her boyfriend lumberjack whatever pulled out a
gun and shot the fur clean off my left ear.
Big bad my ass.

And I did not dress up like her grandmother at all.
That was just a misunderstanding when I was caught
looking at all of grannies underthings hanging on the line.
It was all too big for me anyway.

But its like this, if you’re big and have that look in your eye
like the guy who lives alone at the end of your
street and collects from garbage cans;
or the drugstore cashier who hasn’t had a break in 6 hours so she
wont even call to see if your scrip is on its way because she thinks
you’re scamming them for drugs;
or the high school football player in a 100 degree
afternoon practice who is told to do one more lap before he drinks—

But its like this, if you’re big and have that look in your eye
you will always be mistaken for big and bad when really truly you
always know that you are terribly terribly small.

The Empresses New Clothes

She invented the impossible:
clothes with no color.
Not white; not beige; not dull
but no color.
The very absence of pigment.
She slipped the shirt over her head,
pulled the pants to her waist and
disappeared under her no color wear.
No one has seen her since.

You've been listening to the poems of Amy Cornell on the Poets Weave. i'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.