Strand Beast

—after Theo Jansen

The wolves bind my belly-cast, my body
a fox-draw, primitive milkground.

The green-eyed ocean had its run
of my skeleton, trumpeted

up any salient sorrow,
until the dog-girl lunged out spring.

Then I was three strangers. I was
wire in the skin, I was put

out of number. I moved a little
like water. I came back to my

seat on the stoop: everything covered
the devil and rocked sorrow out.

Barbara Duffey is the author of the poetry chapbooks The Circus of Forgetting (dancing girl press, 2013) and The Verge of Thirst (South Dakota State Poetry Society, 2013), and the full-length collection I Might Be Mistaken (Word Poetry, forthcoming 2015). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets 2009, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and her prose in CutBank and Exigencies. She teaches at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, SD.