Sun draped across her legs
crossed beneath her like
folded wings,
The Carnivore watches.
Satan said, 'stay naked as you came,'
so here she sat, white as mushroom,
raw as shrimp.
She leans, a sifted sack of flour, against her wall;
love rising within her like a cloud of mosquitoes,
for here comes her Plant Eater.
In her nakedness she hides,
watching him trot across the floor,
his movements thoughtful and slow as cooling lava,
shrugging on his brontosaurus suit like an old bathrobe.
He has vegetarian ankles,
his bare feet are splashed with mud
like an old truck.
Carnivore that she is, she bursts out of hiding
naked as Satan,
and she demands her heart.
“I do not love you,”
she lies,
and points to the cedar box in his soft hands.
“Now give me back my heart.”
“No.”
he cries,
and runs from her.
She knows the box is locked and has no key,
though the brontosaurus has not been told
that there is no hope
for this particular heart.
He hides from her behind a tree,
but the tree puts down its other leg and walks away
leaving him exposed as the naked Meat Eater
who catches up to him now.
This time,
before she can get to the tying by the wrist to the chair,
he swallows the box
and holds it in his belly.