Wolf Moon

 Moon to full extent

                            hunting the pines, willing a wolf’s soprano.

The pack leaves tomorrow, could not have a future—

  ::

  Field looks across a dark happening—

                   rabbit blood trickling snow where a girl makes an angel.

                    Wings soaring overhead, her snowy chest pumping.

  ::

Wolf forest. Wolf storm of snow.

The wolves emerge invisible from the snow-burnished trees.

               Night quiet, perfect as winter’s girl.

  ::

But the night is not to be defanged                            

              or to change the unchanging and given chapters a girl is

given to live.

               The girl lying down in snow, a landscape of shine and epitaph.

  ::

                              The girl flying over the girl.

  From below, a corpse.

  From above—

                                   her wings an aria

                                                       soloing no more waiting to be free.

               Her snow-flecked hair a star trail

                            shuttling across winter in an infinite

             blur of white trillion crystalline flakes.

  ::

  Believe the girl.

                                   Her splendor-dazzled drift over Earth

by morning gone.

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First published in The Long Now Conditions Permit, published by the University of Nevada Press, 2025. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Nevada Press.

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Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the Test Site Poetry Prize and a 2025 University of Nevada Press title, and The Minuses, a Center for Literary Publishing Mountain/West Poetry Series title and winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. Macarty’s four chapbooks include two published by Vallum Chapbook Series in Montreal: In 2024, The Whole Catastrophe, a finalist for the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award; in 2017, Mind of Spring, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, BC Arts Council, and the generous editors of magazines such as Colorado Review, Interim, The Malahat Review, Seneca Review, and Volt, Macarty’s writing is forthcoming in Action, Spectacle, Barrow Street, Conduit, Distropika, and Rain Taxi. She supports writers as an independent mentor, editor, reviewer, and as a creative writing teacher at Simon Fraser University. Macarty lives in and learns from the arborescent desert around Tucson, Arizona, and the rain coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. 

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