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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 16: 1 Jan. 2023
Poem: 86 words
By Penelope Moffet

Roosevelt Elk

 
We curled on the forest floor, 
tentless, in the cocoon 
of my father’s down-filled 
army-navy sleeping bag 
from World War II 
we’d managed to squeeze 
our amorous selves into. 
We were lucky: none 
of the approximately 
200 annual inches of rain 
the Hoh Rain Forest gets 
fell on us. In early light 
I woke to my husband’s 
bright eyes staring upward, 
his whisper of “Don’t move,” 
the massive antlers 
and the huge jaws 
calmly chewing 
sweet and dewy grass 
beside our heads. 

Penelope Moffet
Issue 16 (1 January 2023)

is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems have been published in The Missouri Review, One by Jacar Press, Natural Bridge, Permafrost, Gleam, The Rise Up Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Gyroscope, and other literary journals. She has been the recipient of fellowships at Dorland Mountain Arts, The Mesa Refuge, The Helen R. Whiteley Center, and Alderworks Alaska. She lives in Southern California.

 
 
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