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Cryptids
by Marcia Hurlow

August 18, 2021 Contributed By: Marcia Hurlow

Dark forest 2  

Lucky has stopped barking at the squirrels.

The sun just risen over the horizon,

he’s no longer running across the field

after the barn swallows who were diving

at him, herding him away from their nests.

 

Lucky has disappeared into the woods,

silent except for the scrape and snap

of cottonwood saplings, bird song, insects. 

I imagine he roams with a figure,

tall and slight as the young trees, as tender

 

as the sun filtered by the August leaves.

They brush together like two old friends

who love the twist of weeds where the deer

slept last night, the tree bark smoothed by dawn

and their waking muscles.  The violets grew,

 

the sunflowers flourished here in June,

and now the friends listen to moles harvest

the roots and sort the seeds.  Lucky grazes

his muzzle over the lingering dew.

A moth rises and the figure startles.

 

Having communed for half the morning,

one friend now lifts to his perch atop

a sycamore and dissolves into light.

Lucky, my lanky spotted pup, returns,

joined only by his sharp, black shadow. 


MARCIA L. HURLOW‘s first full-length collection of poetry, Anomie, won the Edges Prize. She also has five chapbooks. More than 400 of her individual poems have appeared in literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago Review, River Styx, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, Stand, Cold Mountain, Zone 3 and The Journal, among others. Last year she received the Al Smith Fellowship for Poetry for the second time. She is co-editor of Kansas City Voices.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Poetry Posted On: August 18, 2021

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