Red Destroys the Wolves

Daddy, daddy, daddy beloved, she said, I'll do anything for you, just tell me true.

Grabbing her boa, she turns on a dime,
Runs off the stage.
Floor is slick, her heels catch.
In the mirror she sees

Pauli beating Sheena with a baseball bat,
Sheena didn’t pay the rent.
Pauli owns the block.

In the back lies Tina with a broken leg,
Tito plowed into her on 5th and Broadway.
Joe wanted her shut up, but good.
Jamie’s apartment burned to the ground.

In the bathroom, all the girls shoot up.
But first they cook the dope, 19 going on 50.
Bruises everywhere.

Fat Irish fuck they call each other.
Candy from the ranch laughs
and laughs and laughs.
She’s dead now, too.

Anne Marie, big with fisherman’s baby,
Just wait five years till he beats her,
Like he did the last one.
Did her, beat her, did her.
Like her brother did,
like her father did.

Noni said: She’ll end up like me,
On the street.

She takes a cab home every night at 2 a.m.
Puts another grand in the mattress,
another month of tuition.
She awakes screaming.
The dream.
A hall of mirrors from which she cannot escape.

In the mirror she sees,
A happy girl of five, arms akimbo
A woman of 65, broken.
No, she will not succumb.
She runs to escape the mirrors.

~

Years later, in front of a mirror in a high rise condo,
Razed from that fire-breathing pit from hell
Where mirrors and deceit once were the only law,
She remembers.
In the bathroom, all the girls
they shoot up.
Shivers up her spine.
She shakes her head.
No.
That was then.
They’re all dead now.
But I am not, she says.
Shivers up her spine.
Mirrors keep talking.
No escape from the mirrors.
I must go on.

~*~*~*

It was the night she lost her soul.
Jasmine lost her fur coat.
Wittendon III’s wallet was lifted.
No law in this murder.

A white dove flew in and the throng
descended until she was crimson blood,
crumpled, wings broken.
Birthed from Leda’s womb.
No law in this murder.
It was them or her.

In a flash she rose from broken dove to firebird:

Fire breathed from her eyes she
scorched down to the fish heads,
dismembered from their bodies,
bulging eyes drooling.
No law in this murder.

The girls they all shoot up in the bathroom.
Shivers up her spine.
Mirrors keep talking.

She awakes screaming.
The dream.
A hall of mirrors from which she cannot escape.

She knew what she had to do:
She vomited,
then turned to the fish eyes.
AK-47.
No law in this murder.

Mirrors keep talking
of  the night she regained her soul.

~*~I used to volunteer in a woman's shelter. These are their stories.  I wrote this a few years ago one evening, in an hour.