Your bronze statue’s damaged from all the tourists who rub a breast for luck—in Verona, at the Casa di Giulietta, it grows holes, burnished from the friction of so many hands. Holy girl. Mauled flower. In high school, I fell a little in love with Olivia Hussey, her fiery green eyes, her feistiness, the two-second flash of her breasts across the screen, which the teacher tried to cover—too late—with a poster. Whirligig girl, thirteening through a country of volcanoes and smoke, now that my own daughter is your age, just shy of a sonnet, a well of secrets, I confess I hate the story you’re caged in. You marry after a day’s acquaintance, sweep aside Romeo’s manslaughter, embrace his nightshade. A few acts later, you slide his knife into your chest, make of your body a sheath. I want to rage at your “creator”—dear puppet, let’s be honest, he’s pulled your strings all along. I want to travel back in time, say thirteen is still a child. A child. Bambina, signorina, little rose window flushed scarlet, sun smatter blushing your panes. Did you know Olivia was 16 when she played you, too young to be flashing anything, but the director nicknamed her Boobsamina, hollered it in front of the crew, cajoled her into shooting the bedroom scene topless. O, Shakespeare. O, Zeffirelli. A plague on both your houses. O, Patriarchy. For my daughter’s sake, for every girl’s sake, I want to cut these strings. Resurrected dame, new-made Montague, the bright pool of you pooling on a dagger’s edge, incarnadine, staining mausoleum stone. For every lovesick kid who feels trapped in their narrative, I want a new ending. In Spain, there’s a version of your story no one remembers, where the complex knots of the plot come undone: priest’s missive received, Romeo arrives in time, and you shame feuding parents to repentance. I love to imagine you grown, even greying. Here you stand on a different balcony, brushing, oiling, braiding thick coils of your daughter’s hair into a crown, before you descend together, arm in arm, into the garden, to see what pushes up through soil, what opens in the sun—musk-rose, lily, woodbine—what has been allowed to bloom.
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Dayna Patterson is a photographer, textile artist, and irreverent bardophile. She’s the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019), If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020), and O Lady, Speak Again (Signature Books, 2023). Honors include the Association for Mormon Letters Poetry Award and the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky.