Vera Kroms

After Being Raised by Wolves

I miss the tangle of brothers
over a warm perish

of fox or rabbit.  The muzzle
and sniff in good sleep.

Rain sleeking my hunches.
Here, it is all corners,

daylight carried indoors,
a tale about a girl in red

which ends wrong
every time.  The way they skin

themselves at night,
lie down as if to offer up

their bellies stuns me.
I visit windows now to glimpse

the world.  My paws grow
useless.  In my throat still lives

the sounding of my kind.
When I sit outside a hive

and listen to the deep
language of the business there,

I know belonging.

Vera Kroms lives and writes in Boston, MA.  She has degrees in mathematics and has worked as a programmer for many years. Her chapbook Necessary Harm was published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Tupleo Quarterly TQ13, Gulf Coast, Colombia Journal of the Arts, Southern Poetry Review and others.