Dave Bonta's wolf seems caught between wildness and something that has been done to her. The "wrong-gone" wolf carries a waving flag, an image that could suggest surrender or a signal that has outlasted its meaning. Around her, the world has been reduced: the forest is "flattened & abstracted" into glass, and traps hang open like toothless ancestors, their menace gone but their stories still told.
The wolf can sleep by a fire, and rabbits graze in her dreams, yet when she searches for "the howl in her throat" she finds only "clipped syllables of command." The poem suggests that her voice has been replaced by the language of those who handle her. Even when she is released into her "native habitat," the freedom feels uncertain.
The ending shifts the mood toward something quieter. She drinks rainwater from railway tracks, which the poem hints at through "parallel tracks" and a creature whose feet never leave the earth. The tone is wistful, uneasy, and tender toward her.