Noah Davis

White-Headed Eagle, Audubon Plate XXXI

What other moon
can I claw
from the river?

Barn Owl, Audubon Plate CLXXI

Do you see me as foxes see stars,
above and blinking?
Or have we eaten enough meals together
to know we’re both ghosts
of this river valley whose current we’ve learned
to speak,
our voices sending skulls back over
our tongues?

Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, Audubon Plate CXXVIL

We three,

like water
to a
sinkhole,

are pulled together
through the fruit

as if there were no other path

to follow.

Noah Davis’ poetry collection The Last Beast We Revel In is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. Davis’ first collection, Of This River, won the Wheelbarrow Emerging Poet Book Prize from Michigan State University’s Center for Poetry, and his poems and prose have appeared in The Sun, Southern Humanities Review, Best New Poets, Orion, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, North American Review, and River Teeth among others. His work has been awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the 2018 Jean Ritchie Appalachian Literature Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University. Davis earned an MFA from Indiana University and now lives with his wife, Nikea, in Missoula, Montana.