» Poetry

When I Am Dorothy Gale

The curtain comes crashing down

and there I am, ruby-footed and murderous,

doing it all for the bloated shadow

of a little man. How foolish I have been

again and again, poppy-cocked

and clumsy, letting the boom of a voice, the cast

of a giant, tease me into storming

the castle to take what I never lacked. What is

more incarnadine: the glitter of these

shoes or the myth of blood now on my hands.

I look at the man and he looks back,

the fury of being caught pinking his cheeks.

I am not the heroine, and I know that

too late. He has no power to give me, after all,

the fading of his theatrics, and if he did,

I understand he’d keep it. We all fell for green,

called it real. There’s no place like money.

There’s no seduction like a beast of sewn-up skins,

a cotton ball on fire, a thrown voice

that tells us what we want to hear. Which of us

escapes? He told the lie; I did the killing.