To Marie Antoinette, by Kelly Samuels

To Marie Antoinette, from a Woman Who Also Was
the Talk of

In the corridor back when
                                                          and now
             
               and in the in-between.

He said people are too busy to care about anything
but themselves, but
he was wrong.

The illustrations did you harm.

And all the salon talk:

                                                  Did you hear?
                                                  Did you know?

As if they did.

Sticks and stones.
Sticks and stones.

Later: another woman’s
​head on a spike.​

To Marie Antoinette, from a Woman Who Lost Her Looks

Suddenly, as if time had sped up.
The bright eye dimmed. Baggy elbows.
Milk baths in winter.

How much can you scrap away
with a pumice stone? 

Your hair turned gray just
                                                         like
that. And they said, She’s not
           what she used to be

There were paintings.
There were pictures. 
                                               And a kind of

dissonance. 
                               If we closed our eyes
and didn’t use our hands, we could imagine
we were what we had been.


To Marie Antoinette, from a Woman Familiar
with Anemia and Grief

As if to rest was all 
you asked for—the one room 
with green papered walls.

Haggard. Sickly 
pallor. Dragging our sorry asses
around

where the sun was barred. In fits
                                                                                and starts.

And you said No matter. 

Flowers were left
Then not. And we cared, slightly. 

I’d ask him to pick up my arm only to
let it drop
in my lap. Say That’s how ​
it feels.

Kelly R. Samuels is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited, 2019) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Salt Hill, The Carolina Quarterly, The Pinch, Small Orange Journal, and The Rupture. She lives in the Upper Midwest.