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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 17: 29 Jan. 2023
Poem: 147 words
By Ace Boggess

Fire Fox

 
Its eyes blazed 
in the cellphone 
camera’s light 
like Gort’s 
cyclopic laser, 
but a matched pair, 
demonic on screen. 
I caught it 
slinking down the yard, 
careful not to 
rustle leaves. 
It startled me first. 
When I stood, 
raised the lens & 
pressed the app, 
the fox raced back 
the way it came, 
then turned, 
returned, 
circled a sapling 
as if chasing 
its tail, playful, 
a dancer 
in the spotlight 
I extended. 
I know brightness 
terrified it 
like a hound 
tracking its moves 
for the rifleman 
behind. Yet, 
it lingered 
so I could get it 
on film—I 
want to say film, 
but what is film 
in a digital world? 
Anathema 
to language 
as the fox 
to this hillside 
in the city. 
It finally fled 
one way 
or the other, 
its eyes burning 
in binary code 
on my iPhone 
that never forgets 
any myth it makes. 

Ace Boggess
Issue 17 (29 January 2023)

is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.

 
 
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