Hailey Spencer

Hailey Spencer is a Seattle-based poet with a BA in English from Seattle University. She is the creator of three webseries with the independent production company Arsenic Martini Productions. Her poetry has been published by Snapdragon Journal and Unnerving Magazine, and will be featured in the upcoming anthology We Don’t Break, We Burn Brighter. She loves fairy tales and has a tattoo of Baba Yaga’s house on her calf.

The Wolf

Walking the woods with a red cape and hood
comes a girl with a basket of sweets.
The girl, she is kind, and the girl, she is good
and she’s bringing her granny these treats.

She’s stopped by a wolf who comes sniffing about
and asks where she’s going today.
She gives him directions, leaves nothing to doubt
and he goes there a different way.

The wolf soon finds Granny asleep in her bed
and he asks in his most childish voice.
“Oh Granny, you there, are you sick, are you dead?”
And she lets him in by her own choice.

He swallows her whole; now he lies there in wait
as the girl comes along down the trail.
She enters the door—firmly sealing her fate.
When she sees the wolf, her face turns pale.

“What big arms—what big eyes—what big teeth—”
the girl gasps, understanding a moment too late.
Now he’s eaten her too, a devouring too brief
for his hunger to truly abate.

The wolf’s now asleep in this house in the woods.
Soon a hunter comes ambling along,
slits the throat of the wolf, rescues Red Riding Hood,
and then strolls away humming a song.

The girl and her granny, now partly dissolved,
have been freed from the dangerous beast.
So the girl skips back home, their adventure resolved
and she grins with her now fang-like teeth.