HEDGEHOG’S DILEMMA
Danielle Blau
She was making soup from discarded
dress shirts she found in her bedclothes
when she realized he had left her.
Pinstripes, starved to yellow, bobbed
on hiccups in her copper stock,
sapped of pizzazz by too long a boiling.
Her face was a soft tomato
in the steam, and who would have
thought her skin came off so easily,
was draped so loose around her cheeks
like summer-weary dogs? She stirred
with driftwood fingers and wondered
what she had left. No salvo of heels
came from room adjacent, and she heard
no draggling toes, but maybe
newcomers had grown
unnoticed like quiet fruit.
It was possible, too, that she
was a turnip, had lost her organs
in a fit of white sighs. She knew
no more than her wreathing hand,
which, wreathing no more, found
she’d no chinaware, so there, in slant
of buxom afternoon, she spat out
her breath, filled dainty
ribs with soup. Outside,
in the vegetable patch,
a hedgehog was pulling up parsnips.
Pendulums from teeth,
hollow hairs brambled near,
they sighed, This is how it is
to sleep beside a loved one.