Did anyone ever ask any one of Nikita’s daughters
after Alexander Pushkin
Did anyone ever ask any one of Nikita’s daughters
if they wanted a vagina from the devil’s basket.
conjured by a witch and stored with so little ice.
an organ that had been ridden cross-country on
horseback. had no mind of its own and had flown
up into the trees with all thirty-nine to get stuck up
in the leaves. Clearly not queer at all given that it flew
down at the site of any old whatsit. and furthermore
not even to fuck it, just to crawl back into a box
like the whatsit wanted of the crew of thingums. Witch
only knows how many grimy fingers the poor things
endured. No one asked the tzar’s daughters
if they wouldn’t rather be holeless, lipless and better
unbewitched by devil and hag and flasher
envoy and kingly pop than to lift their skirts
to anyone wanting to see what was missing. or unmissed.
Copyright © 2020 by francine j. harris. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 24, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was pretty delighted to find the stark and raunchy folktale poem ‘Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters’ by Alexander Pushkin. So delighted in fact, that in my poem I sort of take the core sexism in it – on the chin, so to speak. Perhaps more importantly, to my mind, is to learn that apparently Pushkin’s dirty mind was rather embarrassing to some of his archivists, and censored so intensely during the revolution that his authorship was nearly removed from some of his more taboo earlier verses. But the Nikita poem is really fun and I, in turn, found this poem liberating and fun to write.”
—francine j. harris
francine j. harris
francine j. harris was born in Detroit. She earned a BA in English from Arizona State University in 1997 and an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in 2011.