‘The Dawn & Snow White’s Mother’
— Nix Thérèse
Because “Snow White” is a fairytale where racial dynamics are more assumed than explored, ‘The Dawn & Snow White’s Mother’ feels refreshing in its attempts to locate why this is the case. Regardless of tone, the mother’s skin can’t seem to exist in this landscape without some measure of violence. “Pliant” as a blackberry with “ink as unpredictable as / the brittle crunch a child witnesses when / they snuff the life out of a housefly” offers a darkness that betrays little until punctured or intimately pressed upon. Her skin falling closest to the shade of night prevents us from easily noting the channels of blood, yet we know this veiling power doesn’t mean that pain never houses itself inside her body, especially when she’s pulled from this world “into the cosmos.” When she’s “flayed sunrise gold / complete with pink cheeks & a fleeting / shimmer”, the heat seems to rise from underneath the surface. Her body keeps such complete inventory of exertion that even the cheek-swells are marked by her blood. So when we flow into her “ow[ing] the universe a dowry for the upturned impossibility that was her child,” it feels damning that her progeny is forced to be so pallid because the mother is a woman who “goes nowhere without her color.” Instead of allowing whiteness to be named the ultimate beauty standard, the skin becomes unable to mask anything, belying a vulnerability to the elements that’s only amplified by the lack of her mother’s protection and guidance. If you can’t blend in, you’re forced to stand out, and I now question whether her captivating nature in the original is closer to a glare, like sunlight shimmering off the side of a snowbank.