SOMETIMES, WHEN I TRY TO TYPE WORLD by Priscilla Wathington

SOMETIMES, WHEN I TRY TO TYPE WORLD

I type wolf. 
As in: The sun is setting over my part of the wolf right now. 
As in: Anywhere in the wolf but here. 

What I know is the old home
is always playing her best hits:
again I’m in that pink room
listening to Beit Hanina’s eastern hills,
her wild dogs’ hymns.
First, the base notes —
rumble tones — desire.
Then, that high-flung crescendo. That moon peal. 

As in: The wolf is at your fingertips.
As in: That was a different life, a different wolf. 

Here, we visit the Mexican gray wolf brothers, 
Garcia, Prince, and Bowie,
at the San Francisco Zoo;
watch them trot ragged circles in the dirt
for children with their tongues out. 
A sign outside their enclosure reads: 
“Please refrain from howling.”
In a red circle, a silhouette of a howling
wolf is x’ed out. My son asks,
“Shouldn’t it be a howling man?” 

As in: He’s carrying the wolf on his shoulders.  
As in: It’s not the end of the wolf. 

In what may be the earliest version 
of Red Riding Hood, a mother goat sets off
for the woods to find food
for her family, leaving her young behind.
This is where the wolf finds them—
hiding in their own home. 
But in Europe, it is the child who is sent out
from the home (which is already full of food,
by the way) into the woods:
red and scented.

As in: I feel alone in this wolf.
As in: She’s not long for this wolf. 

When my son bores of fairy tales, 
I make up a real thriller 
about a mama, with a long, dark braid, 
just like mine. Every night at 9, 
her faint, bleached mustache would grow
foul and bushy; her neat piano 
fingernails turn sickly sharp. 
Then she’d tear out of that beige 
duplex on Bowley—  
“That’s enough stories,” he’d say. 

He’d say: “I’m asleep.”
As in: I’m dead to the wolf.