If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love, and Other Stories

On her wedding day

she is red and black and white:

cheeks flushed with desire,

dark hair spilling over bridal gown.

She sits before her mirror,

toasting the best man.

He smiles, tips scarlet tablets

into her ruby wine. “To celebrate,”

he says. He is the huntsman, dark

burning before her wild, confused brain.

Slashes, wails — now, he is dragging her

through black forests of lamp-posts

toward a white-walled hacienda,

skylights shining down on

alabaster vases, cement sculptures,

carpets pale as innocence.

Into her ear he whispers desire

for her secret, inevitable ruby

cut from her chest and stowed

in a box beneath his pillow.

Drugs distort his face:

huntsman, dwarf, neglectful father,

he could be any of the men who’ve trailed

black wounds across her soul.

Her prince was a mirage

dreamed between bloodthirsty men.

This story is red with her own blood.

To live it is to bleed.

He pulls away, drags her

to a bedroom lined with mirrors

glittering colorless

diamond facets like coffin walls.

She hallucinates witches

black in mirrored depths,

cackling at her and her and her and her

in a thousand refractions.

She is fairest of all.

She is white as diamond.

She hitches her wedding gown

and runs into the mirrors

to shatter the coffin

to slip into a tale

of beige and pink

and grey.