Wrong-Gone Wolf

The wrong-gone wolf trails a flag that won’t stop waving, not even when the forest has been flattened & abstracted into a panel of sea-green glass, or when traps gape like tooth- less ancestors who built their reputation on raising wayward human children, pulling the moon from the sky, that kind of thing. The wrong-gone wolf can lie down & sleep beside a fire. Rabbits graze unperturbed in the margins of her dreams, where she goes to hunt for the howl in her throat & finds nothing but clipped syllables of command. Released once more into her native habitat, she laps rainwater from the parallel tracks of a creature whose feet never lose contact with its enemy, the earth.