The American Girl Museum, Ravel’s Dead Princess, and The Lady Chapel
Irene Zhang
— A quasi-feminist study of some sort
It’s frankly weird to have your life story on a plaque.
Even weirder to have it next to you. Perhaps
that relieves me of this duty, but
would it be that scary if I make some sounds?
They say all the world’s a stage but
I don’t see velvet on these glass cases.
There is no intermission—nor is there in life if
you like extended metaphors—but hear me out.
I’m not a horror story, not even as good.
I’m afraid I don’t tell it particularly well: they gave one of us aprons,
another cornrows, another teepees and
that’s all. But isn’t it frightful that we stand so
neatly, next to each other? They should’ve
stacked us up, let us play hide and seek;
toss the bonnet to the Flower Child, lay a Star of David on the Under-
ground Railroad.
Stranger girl, join us.
We are each other’s mothers on Michigan Avenue.
“Do not be surprised, that title has nothing to do with the composition. I simply liked the sounds of those words and I put them there, c’est tout.”
He probably molded you in a daydream, but
you, infanta, are as real as parallel harmony.
You have body, movement, phrases, and
I’d say that’s better than most of us.
I think of you in a processional, in white,
in a misty Iberian afternoon, in tears sometimes. I give you
courtly heartbreaks, trembling fingertips, paper-thin lips,
and a short epitaph next to Sundayly modes.
Every dissonance grinds you to dust, to a dance.
We’ve laid on the same marble for centuries
without laying eyes on each other. The perfect
exercise in symbolism (they call us “partners in
throne and grave”), equal parts women,
queens, romance. They stopped us from oblivion
to craft one perfect irony, but how funny.
In life we couldn’t share this Isle, but
in death we fit nicely into one room.
Keep my body whole. My crimson dress washed
white. Seal me within my solitude, my battle cry.
Hands folded towards two Resurrections and
flowers, finer companions than ghosts.
Here comes another coronation.
Irene Zhang was co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Frog & Flowers for Volumes #1 and 2 between 2017–2019. Irene graduated from Mulgrave in 2019 and went on to study English and History at university. She worked in policy research afterwards and is now in graduate school at Stanford. She still likes poetry a lot.