Seven short lines, and a war is already underway. In "Fight Of The Wolves:", Logan Brosemer pictures a person as a battleground where two wolves, one white and one black, struggle for control. The central idea is an inner conflict left unresolved. The speaker doesn't claim to know which side will win, and instead of picking one, turns toward something else entirely: flight.
The opening two lines are built like a reflection. "The white wolf with black eyes, / The black with white." The second line drops its nouns, as if the mirror image needs no spelling out. The result is a chiasmus, with white and black, then black and white. Each animal carries a trace of its opposite in the one place where it looks out at the world. It's tempting to read white as good and black as bad, and the poem invites that reading by using the oldest colour code there is. But a white wolf seeing through black eyes and a black wolf seeing through white are not clean opposites. Judging by this imagery, the struggle may be less virtue against vice than two halves of one self, each already stained by the other.
The "me" arrives only in line 3: "Locked inside me they fight." Until then we seem to be looking at two animals from the outside, so the reveal turns the picture into a self-portrait. "Locked" works two ways. It suggests confinement, with the wolves shut in and the speaker shut in with them, and it suggests locked horns, two forces gripped together and unable to break apart. Neither reading is comfortable, and both fit.
The poem's sound reinforces this. The long "i" runs through almost every line: eyes, white, inside, fight, die, time, I'll, fly. It is also the sound of the pronoun, so the noise of the conflict is, quietly, the noise of the self. The rhyme is loose and irregular rather than strict. "White" and "fight" chime across lines 2 and 3, and "die" returns in the last line as "fly." Because the rhymes come unevenly, the poem feels spoken rather than constructed.
The line lengths shape the tension. Lines 1, 3 and 7 run to six syllables, but the two questions shrink to four and three: "Which will prevail? / Which will die?" The lines tighten like a held breath. There is a shift in diction here too. "Prevail" is a formal, abstract word, and "die" is blunt and bodily, so the question drops from the language of contests to the language of death. The poem assumes that one wolf must be destroyed, and never imagines peace between them, even though its mirrored colours hint that peace might be the more truthful outcome. That is an inference, but it gives the poem a productive friction.
Then comes the pivot. "Only time can tell" is a familiar, almost shrugging phrase, a deferral that sounds oddly casual after the violence of the lines before it. The next line begins "But until then I'll fly...." and the whole poem turns on that "but." Wolves are earthbound hunters, and the speaker answers them by choosing the air. The word also quietly completes a pairing, because "fight" in the title and "fly" at the end recall the phrase "fight or flight." The speaker takes neither side of the war and opts for the other half of the phrase. Whether this is escape, defiance or a kind of freedom is left open. The rhyme with "die" ties that choice to the stakes, since flight here is lived right beside the possibility of death. The trailing dots leave the sentence unfinished, just as the fight is.
Part of the poem's interest lies in what it withholds. Readers may be reminded of the popular story of two wolves inside a person, in which the one you feed wins. Brosemer offers no such moral or formula. His speaker doesn't feed either wolf and doesn't claim control. He admits uncertainty and finds a way to live inside it. The poem is slight, and it doesn't pretend to be more, but it compresses a very common human experience, being pulled in two directions at once, into a handful of images a reader can carry away. Its answer to the question of what you do while the question stays open is a single word, and that word is "fly."