My husband says, can’t trust foxes, their eyes like geodes. The wind brings red fur in my window, and the smell of them clings to my sheets. At the shrine of Inari, he rescued me. I see in his face he will leave me, the fox tail beneath my bed clothes betraying. He swears he didn’t know I was kitsune, though my sharp glances were everywhere, jumping when the dogs bayed. The brown silk robes of my youth, the smell of smashed leaves underfoot wherever I walked. The curl beneath the bedsheets. Foxfire, foxflare, foxfur. Our noses were flames in the forests. The light of torn paper lanterns is never true, the moonlight uneven. He always praised my face, the narrow nose, high cheekbones, close-set eyes. My hair red even when I brushed it darker. Come sleep with me, he asked, even after. Stay with me. Far away, a fox barking at good fortune. Faithful, faithful, the vixen snaps at his ankles. The taste of rust in the mouths of our charmed children.

Jeannine Hall Gailey (WA)  is the author of one collection of poems, Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006). Her poems have been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer's Almanac, and appear in The Iowa Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Seattle Review.