Against Clamor

We swear we saw an impossible wolf next to the interstate, 
across from the shuttered correctional facility. 

We watched two entangled birds, falling spiral, unsure 
if this was a romance or a death wish, or neither, or both. 

We smiled at a toddler dressed as a vampire, squealing pleased 
in his baby blood, despite the late sun, the dusk to come. 

We suspected that winter was once the most insistent season—
all those little ice ages, freezing European capitals slick and starving—

that couldn’t happen now, not in our plastic time, 
the kind called late in the history books. 

We shifted the light, the hours, dragged our clocks across 
the land behind us, and called it, again, a saving. 

The more clamor the better, we said. We never saw, all night, 
the brutal procession of foxes, slinking silent beneath the high cold stars. 

KRISTEN HOLT-BROWNING

Kristen Holt-Browning is a poet, writer, and editor based in Beacon, New York. She has published a chapbook, The Only Animal Awake in the House, and she is a recipient of a Hortus Arboretum Residency for Literary Artists. Her first novel, Ordinary Devotion, is forthcoming from Monkfish Book Publishers.