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  • The Family Story
  • Shangrila Willy (bio)

“And the best thing about the legend isI can enter it anywhere. And have.”

—The Pomegranate by Eavan Boland

Once upon a time, there was    Once upon a time, there was        Once upon a time, there were

a girl with palm sugar eyes    a man of restless hunger        two sisters

who spun the whole world    who married the most beautiful woman        whose mother and father left them

from a mountain place, green with tea and mist    for three thousand nine hundred and fifty nine miles        in a the thin globe of a small house on the edge of the deep

where the road writhed like a restless snake    in any direction. They left the teardrop        flat plain of dry grass that was to them the wide earth

and searched for a way through the rock    island where a jack fruit tree in the yard was a family’s wealth        and where they built a lean-to from an old mattress

while in every broken crook the water roared down to the sea.    and transplanted to a different dirt that bore sweeter fruit,        into which they told their secrets: [End Page 97]

She was taught the secret of it by her mother who left her    but the leaves turned serpentine, poisonous-- and also the roots,        if we had a mother she would be the most

at a train station one day, her hand slipping free    knotting under the house. The small        beautiful woman in the whole circumference of the world

like a silk scarf unraveling so that the frayed thread    hairs of each new bifurcation thirsted in the dry plain:        and they pressed their hungry hands together, palm to palm,

snarled and split, and there was only a girl with a tangled skein    I want to be a mother, she said and held out her fine hands        fingers bone thin and plump, one like a restless snake, the other

in whose throat the long, white scream rose and fell    to grasp the thing beyond her, to pluck up the fallow strand,        round as a jack fruit which salt had turned sweet,

until a pair of sisters, passing in the street, were caught    to weave it into fecundity. She had daughters,        each who carried a poisonous seed

by her beauty. They leaned their heads together and circled her.    with palm sugar eyes and to them she whispered a secret story. She grew them        harboring a faceted brilliance,

There were little cakes, red shoes with buckles, and picture books    like orchids in the crooks of trees, their roots exposed to the air,        luminescent, each who could weave a story

whose little figures lived in a garden of crisp white dresses.    their illuminated world inside a thin globe of glass.        crooked out of the sparseness of mountain air. [End Page 98]

Shangrila Willy

Shangrila Willy earned a B.S. in Culture and Politics from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in 2003 and a J.D. from Georgetown Law in 2007. She is pursuing an M.A. in poetry and fiction at Johns Hopkins and has most recently appeared in Pear Noir! and Rattle. She has work forthcoming in Gargoyle, Measure, and Sugar House Review.

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