Rachel Toulouse

What was she hiding?
Crouched in her hood
Like a preacher in the pulpit
Like a walnut
Nestled in its shell
Untouched
By the lascivious eye
And the naked fang.

When a lurid canis lupus
Slinks across her path,
She unlatches her basket
And lets him nudge the hard-boiled eggs
With his bristling snout,
Salivating over the honey
In its chambers of wax.

Then he asks her where she's headed
And she spits it out
As if he's pulled the string at her back,
The chattering doll.
Distracting her with flowers,
He suggests an alternate route.

And so, blinking in the sudden darkness,
Our darling starts down the wrong path.
Eventually she winds her way to Grandma's,
But by this time the wolf has...

Swallowed the old bat whole
Like a greased goose liver
And she's kicking at his insides
With her orthopedic granny shoes.

The wolf meanwhile
Has slipped into the proverbial sheep's wool
And his eyes are chinks of light
Under the frilly nightcap.

LRRH, at this point,
Would surely notice something amiss
Had she any wits about her,
But perhaps she decides to play along.

Like a ruby-eyed mouse
Walking on a snake's head,
She flirts with the beast,
Waiting to become a bulge in his belly.

So again with the lunging and the swallowing
And the wolf licks his lips
And curls up to sleep
And he snores
With the slow resonance of a cello
As the hairs of the bow
Are drawn back and forth on the strings.

Along comes a conscientious woodcutter
Who hears all the ruckus
And does not ignore his sense of civic duty,
But springs forth
And splits that wolf open
End to end
Like a baked potato
And who should slide out
Like two pats of butter
But LRRH and Granny
Rubbing their eyes in the light
And instantly plotting their revenge.

So they filled that wolf up with stones
And sewed him shut,
And then they had their picnic lunch
And LRRH got the lecture of her life,
The woodcutter got a cash reward,
And Granny got her nightgown back,
And the wolf was slowly eaten up himself,
From the inside out.