Catch for Us the Foxes

by Jonathan McGregor

The little foxes stalk the garden’s edge,
grinning with green needle teeth.
One is eyeless; one is hairless;
two are tied together by the tails.
They nuzzle at the fence’s broken boards.
The dry air crisps each stalk and leaf.
A fox ignites; its tail-mate turns
into a twist of smoke. The hairless
one’s skin blisters and it cries.
The blind fox bangs against a boundary
stone. Who can grab the scruff of flame
or catch a wisp of smoke? Boots
crunch tiny blackened bones.

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Jonathan McGregor's creative work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Image Journal, Ruminate Magazine, Relief Journal, Dappled Things, Genealogies of Modernity, and Hyped on Melancholy. He is the author of the academic book Communion of Radicals: The Literary Christian Left in Twentieth-Century America (LSU Press, 2021). He teaches writing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and is a poetry editor at War, Literature, and the Arts.