Erica Miriam Fabri - The Bride and the Wolf

Brooklyn poet Erica Miriam Fabri presents a dialogue of love, loss, and acceptance in her dramatic and melancholic “The Bride and the Wolf”. The wolf of this poem has the potential to serve as an allegory for any number of things. Is it a new lover for the widowed bride, or is it the wild and determined spirit of the bride herself? Whatever’s the answer, those final lines of “The Bride and the Wolf” ring out through gritted teeth and set jaw, leaving an aftertaste of hope in a piece which is otherwise rife with tragedy, loss, and change.

The Bride and the Wolf

Bride: After the sun rose, I untied myself from you. To run to my mother.

Wolf: Wolves mate for life. You can’t leave my den for long.

Bride: When I looked up at the day-blue sky, the moon was still there.

Wolf: Could you hear me howling?

Bride: It was the same day-sky moon that I saw the morning my husband died.

Wolf: My howl is a jet. It can travel ten miles of tundra.

Bride: It followed me home. A saucer over my shoulder.

Wolf: There is an opera in my fist.

Bride: It was an immeasurable moon. It sank so low, I nearly hit my head on it.

Wolf: Every rabid scrap of me wants you.

Bride: The day he died, I was so sad that I plucked that morning moon from the sky.

Wolf: I was angry before. Now I am butter.

Bride: But to my surprise, it grew back.

Wolf: I don’t want to spend one more set of stars on a mattress without you.

Bride: Where will we live? The whole world is a butcher.

Wolf: I will build us a cave

Erica Miriam Fabri

Erica Miriam Fabri is a Brooklyn-based poet and the author of two books: Morphology (Write Bloody Publishing) and Dialect of a Skirt (Hanging Loose Press). Morphology was the winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Award and Dialect of a Skirt was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and included on the bestseller lists for Small Press Distribution and the Poetry Foundation. She teaches writing at Pace University and College of Staten Island. ericafabri.com