By Clara Elizabeth
If we are here constructing narratives
I’m a much better story-teller than you are.
My grandmother was a poet, taught by Langston Hughes.
It was more like this:
I was Little Red Riding-hood
And you the hungry wolf
Except I’m Little Red whose grandmother hung a lithograph of a wolf over the head of
her bed when she was a girl.
So I know all about you and your kind.
See, I knew you would be about
Just by the smell of you:
Sweet, cloying desperation
Starved lust for any skimpy morsel of Purity
Your thrashing greed to be the Animal on top.
I didn’t have to see all the way into those dark, beckoning woods to know that you were
lurking there.
I’m no longer that type of fool.
I lead you all the way to sweet blanketed granny.
Waited for you to mount the bed
And begin moaning with pleasure —
Devouring your sleeping prey
To press the knives of my fingertips into the fragrant blushing skin of your tender,
muscled back.
(If you want to finish someone
By playing into powerlessness, All the power lies in your timing.)
Lover, for the sake of being clear with you,
I will ask you for your response:
Who really is Little Red,
And,
Who is The Teeth?
For you are now little and red against my teeth
In my lipstick
Smeared
And on granny’s now splatter-paint linen sheets
Lush,
Before me
In a funeral bed of your-own-heart soaked quilt.
What you may not know, lover:
The knives on my fingers
(The ones you licked honey off of when I secretly shared my basket of goodies with
you)
Cut both ways.
See, sweet granny’s long been dead
(As, now are you)
And I hardly have the karmic merit in the bank to pay my ferocious bail.
Yet, I hope your getaway in Hell isn’t too much of a drag;
For prison won’t bother me.
Sweet granny was staunch to teach me when I was a girl
That anywhere you go
Is just
A place to go
From the place you are.