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©2009 Angelic Dynamo
Contents © their respective authors.

The Strike of Coming Alive by Caroline Hagood
(after Anne Sexton’s Red Riding Hood)

Oh wolf, I am the only one
who knows what you are: the gentle caress
so feared by the mother, the beast she has made
of the first lover, in order to keep me
the color of snow, so afraid that I might discover
a taste for the forest and the murk
of its trembling trees.

She fears that you have found my little red cap,
peeled its many–colored petals,
cradled its balmy leaves, made of it
a rasp of womanly stirring in the big bad woods
as trees witnessed, silent and wakeful,
the strike of my coming alive.

Fear turns lover into beast, and body
upon which my punishment awakens, to warn
young girls that to color their snow
is to die, all briny in the liquid of new life, as mothers
of monstrous children. No one saw
my transformation, that I had become
a woman. But mother,
the wolf is a tender lover.

Oh wolf, old Anne has made of you
a transvestite pregnant
with murderous deception, just to rub
against the page on which she has written:
‘death,’ the orbit of her obsession.
She wanders our poem, high-smiling
through high society, while her blind, mutated heart
roams the labyrinth of its deformity.

She conjures from my story the ashes
of her soured infancy, inserting her eye
at the periphery of a moment. But she is too busy
lusting after death to see the blood
of my beginning. Anne dreams of standup comics
sliding dead down shower walls, making red capes
on white tiles, as she watches,
envious and alive.

After all these years, I speak back
to my authors, to my grim fathers
and even to Anne, I say: ‘Let the river run red.
All who have filled me with fear
of my little red cap, know that my lover is dead
and that Red Riding Hood is pure no more.
Let the river run red.’


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