Ars Poetica with Wolf
by Meg Kim
When I slept at Sam’s house, we woke early to feed the pigs. Scenery so different from my own home, its dewed driveway and high fences. Out here, my senses were entities, flying to the cloying mist. Only one year did they have a sheep: Lykos. Meaning wolf in ancient Greek, Sam said. A joke I’d retell, years after he was gone, until I forgot why I found it funny. In the end, just a creature I touched on the brink of slaughter. I was most fascinated by his pupils, slotted like the mouth of a VCR. Panoramic. Level intake of light. Lykos, bread-soft, breath like a smokestack spewing plumes against my palm. I’d sing to him, in borrowed boots, as early sun spun the creek to ore. I knew something then, in a nervous, cyclonic way. A need for fangs made real in name.
Meg Kim is a poet from Southern Oregon currently based in Chicago. Her debut chapbook, INVISIBLE CARTOGRAPHIES, is forthcoming with New Delta Review, and her work has appeared in Sycamore Review, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal, among others.