vixen’s scream

splintering shriek in the dark      too late for nighthawk       too early for crow
neighbors offer theories--teenagers in the park        screech owl--but no     a 
red fox      her vixen’s scream calling       for her mate      here       in the city     
and who would blame her       she       driven by instinct           pawing sterile
sidewalk      she       evicted from her eden      of thicket       beech and creek     
loose earth      now paved and porched       so she wails       in our snowdrops     
then she’ll make a den for her kits      under a shed in the alley      and forage
in a yard after dark     and she’s not     the only one 

Spectator
         —After Mark Rothko, No. 9, 1948

                 I wake up  	 to an orange sherbet morning 
                 and I'm floating 	
	                     in the bassinet of nature 	
                  among melon beaches     and rosy corpuscles 	

	                     that drip self into each other 
					              and run off the edges 	
                  blueprints to blue spruce 
	                   organisms     pulsating     from     canvas
	   
                radiant with fertility 
	                    and fluent in five languages 	
                I blink to clear the haze and understand 		
                but can’t remove the veil 	
	
			                           I'm spectator to a world
				                          quite content without me

Karla Daly lives, writes, and edits in Washington, D.C. Her poems appear in SWWIM, Rust + Moth, Unbroken Journal, MER: Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships and a midlife graduate of American University’s MFA Creative Writing program.

Image: Rural Red Fox Vixen by Caroline Legg under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.