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Emily Van Kley, a finalist in Narrative’s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of the collection The Cold and the Rust Smell (Persea, 2018), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her work has also been included in the anthologies Best New Poets 2013 and Best American Poetry 2017. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and lives with her partner in Olympia.

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Hunting Season

by Emily Van Kley
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Having shot your first deer,
cut toward its warm center,
sip a bit of blood. Girls
who do this inch in, are grudged.
For boys the threat is rubied,
I mean refusal. Always one,
always the other—we tend

our categories most tenderly.
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