by Michelle Bonczek Evory

~Aizpute, Latvia

Outside the Jewish Cemetery, it stopped
center road, hunched over
its rib thin legs longer than a wolfhound’s,
as if to take a shit.
It sniffed us on the air, loped,
slipped through a wide split
in a garden’s wooden fence.

We saw it.

Like I once saw in New York State
a cougar bounding across a green field
where one's not been sighted
since 1890. We saw it like I saw
my great grandmother at my bedside
after she died, her warm hand

reaching toward my shoulder.
A book launches itself
from a shelf and traverses an entire room.
A table candle’s flame licks the ceiling
on command. This is no wolf. No
dog. Not a ghost. It stepped into the road
from the pages of a book
where wolves stand on hind legs and speak.

I was not alone when I saw it. I was not
alone when the book crossed the room mid-air.
When the cougar disappeared into the trees.
I am not alone now.
The lights of these creatures
and everything that has been
blink around you
as if in the dark, as if in the light
you could see them any better.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michelle Bonczek Evory is the author of The Ghosts of Lost Animals (Gunpowder P), three poetry chapbooks, and the Open SUNY Textbook Naming the Unnamable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations. Her poetry is featured in the Best New Poets and has been published in more than 100 journals and magazines, including Crazyhorse, cream city review, Green Mountains Review, Orion Magazine, The Progressive, and Wasifiri: International Contemporary Writing. She mentors poets at The Poet’s Billow (thepoetsbillow.com).