Red fox, paws planted, staring back on the humanpath, sprung to the woods sifting autumn’sdark rot, annamaya kosha:first beam. I glide with my predator’s gaze,scanning forward: wind-washed stone, gray die-cutsgray ahead, clouds shape-misting: nosouls. Red fox of morning, gray rabbitof evening, un bothered by my dog obsessedwith clumped earth, pithed grass, imprintsof friends and strangers long sent. I place my palm onan oak to commune my worship: branchfallen but the root is breathing. Messenger of the pleasures of the solitaryhunt, copper squire of the underwood, wet floor of rootand hollow, the wrap of a tapered burrowafter the day’s splash of findand harrow. Terror bornelike a lustrous pelt.
Dispellations: Palm Sunday
Feature Date
- September 14, 2021
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Copyright © 2021 by Anna Maria Hong.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poems are recently published and forthcoming in Colorado Review, Plume, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, Fairy Tale Review, and Sonnets from the American: Essays and Poems. She is an Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College.
Summer 2021
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Launched in 1956 (with the first issue featuring work by Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Henry Miller, Bertolt Brecht, and Mark van Doren), Colorado Review is a national literary journal featuring contemporary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Each issue is approximately 200 pages. Published three times a year, CR has a circulation of approximately 1,100, is carried by university and public libraries across the country, and is distributed by Kent News to independent bookstores. The journal receives over 9,000 manuscript submissions each academic year.
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