Ingénues and vixens who aspire to become Vampire Ladies customarily master an art of pleasure such as lawn bowling under starlight, trick candling, or zumba. Howsoever, nothing appealed to the labile little Lady V. until she discovered hand-poetry. She grew into her lissome, weeping-willow loveliness and her rapscallion sexual flair through Grasping the Sparrow’s Tail, Wild Stork Flashes Wings, Upside Down Tortoise, Sleeping Thunderbolt, and Half Moon. Her hands danced with Indonesian shadow puppetry, then clanging cymbals and clacking castanets. They clicked and snapped in red henna and French manicures. In public, she went gloved, but in the private rooms of an unnamed king, she rocked her arms for baby, shook her hands free for abandon, drew her fingers down her cheeks for cry, then crossed her heart and hoped to die. Now the Vampire Lady keeps her hands to herself when she speaks, so she only tells one kind of story though other tales flutter in her hidden fingertips and in the quiver of her upper back, where if she had wings she’d have wings.