The house wriggled gingerbread and cinnamon.
When the bad witch’s mascara ran down

the walls, she turned into the good witch.
“What kind of names are Hansel and Gretel?”

she sang, as she patted the children down
for unseemly bulges and led them by the hand

through the security shield. “Dick and Jane
were here yesterday, couldn’t wait to follow

their trail of after-dinner mints home. And all
you have are crumbs? Well, let’s sit down

to a good, healthy meal right now.” Underneath
the mascara, the wallpaper crawled with clowns.

Their blood-red noses blinked on and off.
“It’s one big circus in here all the time.”

When the witch cracked her whip, a miniature
car somersaulted across the living room. “Get in,

get in.” Dick and Jane, Barbie and Ken, Romeo
and Juliet, Stella and Stanley. The car was solid

with hundreds of others, compacted into a block
for recycling. “Won’t it be hilarious when

the door opens and they all tumble out at once?”
The witch draped her best smile over the saliva

to answer the front bell. Helen and Paris
needing the directions to Troy. She swept them

right in under her wing. A trail of apple cores
behind them as far back as the beginning.

–James Doyle,
The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water
Accents Publishing

More from The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water and James Doyle:

• “the Seals”
• “the Dusk”
• “Queen Victoria Goes on a Picnic”
• “Fossil Rooms”
• “Schoolgirls”

James Doyle is retired, 75 years old, and lives in Ft. Collins, Colorado. His publications include The Governor’s Office, The Sixth Day; The Silk at Her Throat, Einstein Considers a Sand Dune, and Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes. James Doyle’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and others. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s PBS radio show, The Writer’s Almanac, and on Poetry Daily. Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry has featured his work, and his poetry has appeared over a dozen times on Verse Daily. His poems have been reprinted in many anthologies, including Prentice Hall’sLiterature: an Introduction to Critical Reading, used in universities across the country.