The Queen's Girl

I keep writing the date backwards
so that I am skipping seven
or eight or nine years into the future.

If I could peel back the veil
I wonder what I would see
though at this point, I don’t think I should dare it.
I know better than to ask to see what I don’t understand.

Queen Elizabeth did these sorts of things.
She kept John Dee at her side,
to throw bones, and see past her own time
and it changed everything.

She saw herself tried and hung for treason,
for infidelity,
for being barren.
For childlessness.
For witchcraft.
For being an unmarried Woman.

Dee consulted every book he had in his library
of the Unwritten Stories
but they couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
So they took off the Queen’s corset and bra and panties
and dressed them on another woman
and they sent her out there to have that future

And Elizabeth led the Golden Age.
She was a magnificent Queen.

The other woman, she was hung
and quartered. Her head was spiked
not on London Bridge like the others
but on the Tower Wall,
so Elizabeth could see her own face, her other life, rotting out there.
The eyes, for as long as they lasted against the ravens,
stared right at the Queen’s window, still in shock to find herself
dressed in the Queens clothes and beheaded.

These are warnings. History is littered with them.
For the sake of your own eyes,
pay attention.