Fresh Tracks

Abstract

Fresh Tracks Rose McLarney (bio) "Coywolf: New dog-coyote-wolf hybrid already numbers in the millions." After Philip Levine Out of coyote and wolf crossed. Out of coyote's compromisesabout where to live, what to hunt. Out of wolf's big bones,bearing wolf's bulk, fed by wolf's broad jaw, wolf's bite. Out of dog, out of willingness to mate with dog,out of tameness turned. Away from coyness. Out of coyness. Into clamor, crashes of cars and construction, into noiseno longer weapon against the wild. Into crowds, into cities,not creeping. Holding full tail high, nose proudly lowfor the trails to where fat, suburban rabbits go. Into the unheralded havens of highway-sides, into the unclaimedkingdoms of park corners, into habitats we createthat cannot shelter us—the tender furless. Following graveyards'green, beckoning glows from borough to borough. Each generation,gorged on garbage, grows. From earth, when we can no longer endure orbe endured. From cold forests cut and no more, from trees,from all we've made fall like the trees. Following timber,following trade routes, following trains, arriving by railroad,as once to the West, another civilization— [End Page 169] Out of survival, out of desire for it, out of dogs' past being petsand the doggedness with which life persistsdespite the end of one form. Out of the fresh tracks life lays.Over the ways of we who will not scavengeso cannot be saved. Street-crossing, side-walking,coywolves, not coy, they come. [End Page 170] Rose McLarney Rose McLarney's collections of poems are Its Day Being Gone, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Forage (forthcoming), both from Penguin Books, as well as The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books. She has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, Warren Wilson College, and Dartmouth, as well as prizes such as Fellowship of Southern Writers' New Writing Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in publications including the Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, and many other journals. McLarney earned her mfa from Warren Wilson's mfa Program for Writers and has taught at the college. Currently, she is assistant professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and co-editor in chief and poetry editor of the Southern Humanities Review. Copyright © 2018 University of Nebraska Press