Lindsay Bernal
FOX IN HEAT
The sound I’d make being eaten alive
over neon-green ferns,
infiltrating my dream, tender foreplay.
I brought the ax, the baseball bat to bed
as the 2am crickets stilled,
silenced themselves, all longing,
the preposterous stars obscured,
the bamboo disappearing too.
Everything known only by feeling.
Where was the perpetrator—
demonic bird of prey, coyote?
Her mouth before our neighbor
shot his wife but missed, Mary running
in slippers down the fire road.
By sunrise, the prodigal cardinal
striking the slider also survives,
Google identifies the audio as a vixen’s,
telling the dark world
resignedly she’s amorous.
Lindsay Bernal is the author of What It Doesn’t Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), winner of the National Poetry Series. Her recent work appears in Chicago Review, The Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, New England Review, Oversound, and other journals. She coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, where she also directs the Writers Here & Now reading series and teaches undergraduate poetry workshops and courses on poetics.