I Drape Myself in Wolves
I am my own monster and my own scientist. I drape myself
in wolves. I ask questions of the moon and get few answers.
If there is a sea roiling with frogs and a sky gusting locusts,
then it’s well past time to roll up my sleeves. If there is a girl
whose face is growing a horn where there should be a nose,
then we have a new high priestess if she wants the job. We
must love what we’ve invented under the trade winds
blowing east from Wall Street. When I say “love,” I mean we
must love the girl and her horn, but not the conditions that
led to the horn. We must separate the effect from the cause.
I write Naomi Klein, who sends me spells she bought on Etsy
to disappear CEOs. “Start with hundreds of thousands of
activists and add a pinch of turmeric.” The horned girl
haunting the eroded coast serves a beautiful function, but
not the reason gases are eating the sky. There is much here
to parse, much here to do, and it’s somehow already the new
year. The snake sheds, sheds, sheds. The horse rears.
Dawn Tefft’s poems appear in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, and Fence, and are forthcoming in Poetry. Dawn’s first full-length poetry book, Once Upon a Riot, came out through Match Factory Editions in 2025. Her chapbooks include Gosling (Anhinga Press), Fist (dancing girl press), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark). She earned a PhD in English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, volunteers as an editor for Packingtown Review, and works as a union representative in Chicago.
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