Featured Poem II • November 2013
Foxfeast
Yoon Ha Lee
There’s nothing in it for foxes. Your merry eyes, your marrow sweet as abrasions, the machined curve of your thigh. The broth of your blood. Your breath like slow roses. Foxes do not seek your face in the hundred hunched windows of starwheel towers. Foxes do not take by force the hinges of your on-off heart, the stuttering tears. Their prey lives in paradox wires. Broken alleys. Penrose tile wars. Foxes have already gnawed your icemoon cities, knotted your lightships fast. Now, when they feast, smiling their entropy smiles, they chew the axioms first.
Yoon Ha Lee lives in Louisiana and has not yet been eaten by gators.
He says this poem “came from memories of reading Korean folktales about the gumiho, who were liver-eating, shapeshifting nine-tailed foxes, and wondering how they would adapt to a science fictional future.”
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