“

Now reading

Landscape with Scavengers and Bonelight

All day the ravens shit the buck whitetail
back onto his antlers, the thick arcing tines
graffitied with undigested tendons. Coyote-
dragged, draped in a squawking garment
that rises tattered when redtail-harried —
revealing ribs, links of spine, tongue-clean
sockets — and falls, in patches, back, stitched
with wingsound. A feathered hush. Says you will

go down in the dirt. First the four-leggeds
ferrying your shape across the slough, yipping
nothing resembling a name, large birds then like

lamp-drawn moths, before the six-limbed elders
arrive as one mind, as shifting soil, to polish
what’s left, forsaking only the inedible brain.

41,493

poems

4,155

poets

207

poetic terms

Browse the collection

Explore the archive →

Selected

Poems worth returning to

The glossary

The language about poetry

From aubade to zuihitsu, 207 definitions of the forms, figures, and schools that shape the line.

Explore the glossary→