Deborah Bacharach
The Big Bad Wolf
I used to be a constellation,
lived in the sky, the wolf you saw only
at night and perhaps
I hunted through your dreams,
ripped the throat out of grandma
as she leaned over the tub pressing
dandelion leaves into wine
or maybe that was just tuberculosis,
maybe that was just poverty, or the way
America abandons its poor.
You can’t blame me for every death.
I’m not taking them out in childbirth.
Rape in the basement? You know
the odds. That’s a family friend, family.
That’s the thirteen-year-old boy flipping
the skirt of the eight-year-old cousin
in a red kerchief, set to scrubbing
the back steps, then the front.
I’m not making this up.
I stalk the Wissahickon valley
where the pioneers once stood.
Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, The Antigonish Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Cimarron Review, among other journals, and in the anthologies Jump Start: A Northwest Renaissance Anthology (Steel Toe Books, 2009), edited by Lonny Kaneko, Pat Curran, and Susan Landgraf; A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002), edited by Margarita Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, Micki Reaman, and Carole Simmons Oles; and Sex and Single Girls: Women Write on Sexuality (Seal Press, 2000), edited by Lee Damsky. She lives in Seattle where she a writing tutor. Online at DeborahBacharach.com
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