Wednesday, February 12, 2025

The Princess and the Frog by Devi Nina Bingham

Everything and nothing made me royalty.

My art of painting stories

of the princess and the frog.

I was everything:

blooming, flowering, fragrant, and bursting

with the colors of a Mexican peasant girl

who climbed out of her cage of pain. 

And I was nothing:

the scalpel's blade hacking away at my brittle bones.

The blood seeping, the skin pulling my stitches apart

like a too tight corset.

A crown of thorns laid upon my frowny brow,

I became the posterchild for how to survive 

what was not survivable. 


And you, associating with artists of renown

made little time for me

while I only wanted it all.

Photographs show you looking away

while I stared with hopeless longing

as if an invisible spotlight

creating a halo was shining down

illuminating only you.


When you did see me,

my heart stopped pounding

my blood stopped coursing

and a smile that began in my frigid toes

streaked up through my body

and shot out of my head like bolts of lightning.


Inevitably someone would remark, 

"I don't know what she sees in him."

Because all they could see was a frog

and not my prince.

It was not until the last curtain fell

that I realized my own kiss

had made you beautiful to me. 


 


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