into the swamp night

Maybe I’m carrying a lantern. Maybe

there’s a dagger strapped to my thigh.

Maybe I’m at the center of this spectacle,

this anti-fable, this

tittle tattle, little battle

raven

in full command of her wits.

Megan Denton Ray is the author of Mustard, Milk, and Gin, winner of the 2019 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize (Hub City Press, March 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Sun, The Adroit Journal, Passages North, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.