For once, I’d like to know
just what that woman did
to be chased by fangs and
devils, skulls and whips and
scorn.
Sometimes there are men,
sometimes knife-edged teeth and
leers, sometimes claws and howls
that thrust the skin of waiting breath
aside.
She is in snow. In flame. In frothed
demented seas. Backed into crags on
mountainy land where escape is unlikely
and her back looks bowed or braced or
frail.
Or she is ample and fleshy and her bosoms
are white as the face of the simpering man
on the dancer lamp with the puffed white
hair and pigtail whose arms arc toward his
partner.
He looks like a sinister sister to the white
dancer on the other nightstand but he is in
green pants with a jacket with a flipped up
tail like he was caught in mid-whirl and she is
stiff.
And waiting in a bulging green gown, her hair
like whipped cream swiveling up her tilted
head which looks like it can be pinched off
her scrawny neck with a flick of anyone’s
thumb.
She has quilting magazines at her dainty
slippered feet. And she won’t be rescued
ever from the gaze of the white-haired man with
the hypnotic open arms and she can never turn
away
But there is hell to pay when wolves arrive
flanking a curvy auburn-haired woman who
is bold enough to stare and is at home among
the wolves. They are her sisters, vengeful and
fierce.
That dancer man has nowhere to hide and he
doesn’t look quite so sure of himself now that
the wolves have arrived. There’s a chip on his
self-assured calf where a wolf took an exploratory
nip.
And though I know he’s made of porcelain,
I’m pretty sure that
I can see
a thready trace of
blood.
Kate Falvey’s work has been published in many journals (including previous issues of DO) and anthologies; in a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co-founded (with Monique Ferrell) and for ten years edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech (City University of New York) where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.