Seethe and sputter, throat raved raw,
flint-spark of anger, the airless heat of the house—

come evening, all these things break like a fever,
blood's simmer stilling, the brain's revved engine

winding down, the thwarted longing you had
howled about just a bitter taste on the tongue.

Brisk air slips through the window like a cooling hand
to the brow, smooths furrows, snuffs the flames

of your burning thoughts—a night so quiet crickets
might well be cowering from the day’s wrath, and

in the blue glaze before sun quits over the mountains,
all your rage is replaced with a tender ache to hear

their soft chirr, something to remind you that
a thousand creatures sing their hearts out simply

because the moon rises round and white as bindweed
and the shivering grass is filled with their kind—

all the saw-legged, wild-mouthed clamor merely
the sound of living and claiming your desires.

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Zoe Boyer was raised in Evanston, Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan, and now lives among the pines in Prescott, Arizona, where she recently completed her MA in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Canary, High Desert Journal, Plumwood Mountain Journal, The Hopper, Poetry South, Kelp Journal, and Plainsongs.

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