Two Rabbits in a Snowstorm

If you look closely, you can almost see one, covered by a gloom

made entirely of snow.  Layers of white against nothing

but different shades of white.  The mind lingers on a landscape

it can’t see, as if it were a passenger on a train made of nothing.

Some days I’m a cemetery cut dull by the sun.  Bleached out

details for the scavenger of the discerning eye.  I sigh.  I’m too busy

rambling to the edge of the present and trying to cast aside this

thimbleful of doubt.  As if doubt could explain the pair of barn owls

watching from a set of fallen reeds, pulled from some cloister

of the imagination.  Scouring which part of the psyche they’d like to strike.

Eric Stiefel is a graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also served as junior fellow in poetry. He was recently named the winner of the 2018 Sequestrum New Writer Awards and a finalist in the 2018 Penn Review Poetry Prize. Stiefel’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, The Adroit Journal, Angel City Review, The Louisville Review and elsewhere.