Assent

As a boy I woke

to the troubled

breathing one

morning of a

lamb on

the front lawn.

I could see

the thing lay

mangled in

a coat of dew

and the dog

was carving

into its neck.

Too early in

the world for

so much blood,

I routed the dog

into the barn,

and from the mud

I lifted the infant

thing into my

arms and bore it

across the gravel

while it burst

quietly through

into a world I’d

never known.

An Offense

I recall Rilke writing

once in one of his elegies

that ‘super-abundant

being’ was welling up

in his heart, and I read

it as if it were a sort

of promissory note,

enabling him to exist

better than he did

before he was born,

before life, as if he

had been taught

somehow to want

more than what

only one world

could offer him.

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Travis Wright is a graduate student in Charlotte, where he lives with

his wife Emily and their small daughter. He is interested in devices of ambiguity

and paradox. His work has appeared previously in the Brooklyn Quarterly and

ARTOS, among others.