Two Poems by Karla Daly

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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.

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