Hi, I'm Ruth Awad.

I'm going to read Meg Day's poem, "Once All the Hounds Had Been Called Home." I chose this poem because... it's a banger! It's one of my all-time favorite poems.

I hope you like it, too. When the grapevine had thinned  but not broken & the worst was yet to come of winter snow, I tracked my treed heart to the high boughs of a quaking aspen & shot it down. If love comes fast, let her be a bullet & not a barking dog; let my heart say, as that trigger’s pulled, Are all wonders small?

Otherwise, let love be a woman of gunpowder & lead; let her arrive a brass angel, a dark powdered comet whose mercy is dense as the fishing sinker that pulleys the moon, even when it is heavy with milk. I shot my heart & turned myself in to wild kindness, left the road to my coffin that seemed also to include my carrying it & walked back along the trampled brush I remembered only as a blur of hot breath & a howling in my chest.