13.2 Fall/Winter 2015

Amit Majmudar Recombinant Fairy Tale

 

The beauty sleeps
Guarded by a leopard
In the witch’s garden
Under an apple-tree.

The apple-tree
In the garden guards
A beautiful leopard
From the witchcraft of sleep.

The leopard whisks
The beauty out of the garden
After a treated apple
Leaves the guards asleep.

The beauty wishes
Under an apple-tree
For her guardian to sleep
So she can leap the garden wall.

The garden-variety witch
Who slept with the leopard
Under the apple-tree
Wakes up beautiful.

On her guard in the garden,
The apple-cheeked beauty
Bewitches the leopard
Moments before his leap.

No one guarded the apple-tree,
And now, awakened beauty
Prowls the garden
In a leopard print dress.


Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and twin sons. His third collection, Dothead, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2016.