Tryst

Before the fox leaps,
I catch a glimpse of the vole
dining in the night weeds.
How he gambles
everything he has—
A small sum of flesh.
A prized clover.
Overhead, the pinking sky's
cloudwork spreads and sets his hunger going, despite
what he knows
is frozen in the high fields.
If he's lucky, evening
comes. And he dives
back to his hole,
more alive than before—thinking
only how he loves
to live and die so close
to those striking foxes,
and asks
nothing, nothing
of his brief heart.

–R.K. Fauth

R.K. Fauth is the author of A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees, winner of the Walt MacDonald First Book Prize in Poetry (TTU Press, 2024). Fauth’s writing has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The West Trade Review, and elsewhere. Fauth is a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry, and a winner of a Treehouse Climate Action Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She has held fellowships with The Fulbright Program, The Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and The Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She currently lives in New York City.