Primal Elegy

Stacy Gnall

—God’s last animal
lost in the first forest.

Where now that dash, that cower?
Again day ends. Again

dawn spreads its orange encore around.
Time with its muzzle and bridle.

We tame: a book folds over the boldest word.
Our brute only breath on the cold.

But once in a great white while
the prim fog parts for the slight primals.

There in the light by which boys bully.
Whiskey’s burn and scurry.

And in the violet, skyward tonight
the sound of a lover fast unwrapping his sweet.

Stacy Gnall is from Cleveland, Ohio. She earned her undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA at the University of Alabama. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, the Florida Review, the Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Spoon River Poetry Review.

“Primal Elegy” appears in our Summer 2010 issue.