Dante's Heart
Kate Schmitt
Red Riding Hood
The wolf was a metaphor, even if the teeth were real
in the pocket of her cape. The reminder each time her fingers
wandered into darkness. She hadn’t even been able to scream.
The woodsman had come to borrow an egg
and when a second knock thudded the door, the wolf startled.
She saw it in the wolf’s eyes then as he turned back to her: despair.
Her fear was still there, of course, but now also something else.
Power. The wolf with all his claws had no choices left.
The dry woods hummed with crickets
and he was hungry. Metaphorically, maybe, but the fur
around the lacy collar of her grandmother’s nightgown
was tangled around a button of hardened sap and his metallic growl
came loud from under the blankets. His stomach, about to be opened.
Maybe his heart. She was frozen in the doorway and she heard it:
the same noise she hears now in her head as she looks across the bed’s
tangled sheets where you are sleeping. The wolf, slipcover
from which they pulled her grandmother’s newborn slippery body,
inside her. Looking out through her eyes at you. Desire, fear.
Red Riding Hood
The wolf was a metaphor, even if the teeth were real
in the pocket of her cape. The reminder each time her fingers
wandered into darkness. She hadn’t even been able to scream.
The woodsman had come to borrow an egg
and when a second knock thudded the door, the wolf startled.
She saw it in the wolf’s eyes then as he turned back to her: despair.
Her fear was still there, of course, but now also something else.
Power. The wolf with all his claws had no choices left.
The dry woods hummed with crickets
and he was hungry. Metaphorically, maybe, but the fur
around the lacy collar of her grandmother’s nightgown
was tangled around a button of hardened sap and his metallic growl
came loud from under the blankets. His stomach, about to be opened.
Maybe his heart. She was frozen in the doorway and she heard it:
the same noise she hears now in her head as she looks across the bed’s
tangled sheets where you are sleeping. The wolf, slipcover
from which they pulled her grandmother’s newborn slippery body,
inside her. Looking out through her eyes at you. Desire, fear.
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