Lest by Gail Carson Levine

Gail Carson Levine is the author of the poetry collection Transient (Nightshade Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in: Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing; The Louisville Review; The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks; Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems; and On the Dark Path, An Anthology of Fairy Tale Poetry. She is best known for her many books for children, most notably Ella Enchanted, which received a Newbery honor award in 1998. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University. Levine lives and writes in Brewster, New York.

Because her lips were disfigured, probably by smallpox,

Eudokia of Macedonia didn’t ascend to the throne,

but she liked being a nun.

A royal girl had to control her gaze and keep it from being frank. 

Women were not to use cosmetics or to pluck unwanted hair; 

their faces did not belong to them.

Female beauty was like snow over filth. The snow melts.

In the afterlife, the devil stabbed holes in the skulls 

of female skeletons in the spots where they plucked their hair. 

Flames came through the holes. 

In this life, a woman’s eye was poked out as punishment 

for chatting with friends while her husband slept.

If her husband told her to jump over a stick again and again, 

she had to do it and couldn’t ask why.

A woman loved her lord and her husband, so she dreaded them. 

But none of them dreaded her. Husbands were free to feel 

whatever they felt. Dread, a subset of fear, was a stronger synonym 

for lest, as in, She hid her joy for dread of his anger.

Saint Gregory’s mother had an affair then killed her love children,

but she was cleansed of sin by her son’s prayers. Her prayers

wouldn’t have worked. He had to vouch for her.