Anne Haven McDonnell, Second Place winner of Narrative’s Twelfth Annual Poetry Contest and a finalist in the Fifteenth, is the author of the collection Breath on a Coal, winner of the Halycon Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Living with Wolves. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and is an associate professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Inside a Lateness, a Singing under Snow

by Anne Haven McDonnell

The pine marten have their oral history
here—long memories of salmon skin
on a pile of sunflower seeds. This one

arrives two winters later to curl
her body, a long ribbon of muscle and fur,
in this hanging bucket of birdseed


in first gauzy light. I see that white patch
on her chestnut fur, the pretty darkening
at tips of ears, nose, paws, and tail.
People on couch
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