Outpost on the Danube
by William Robert Flowers

When a place of exile is chosen, it is for the harsh winters.
The summer seems cowed after dead cold months spent
in a single room to save all human heat.
We still have wolves here, and in the torpid freeze
of February, packs come to the city walls,

growl at the guards and the livestock they can smell
shut away in their straw and stabled manure.
They range over fields of sheer ice, between frozen oaks
and ravine walls barbed with gnarled roots.

But every third night a watchman at the wall
will tip pails of food to the wolves, offerings of entrails,
hearts, prophesy and appeasement, food for the animal
known to be awful and holy.

There is no love and no hate in this place,
and the mail comes from the capitol
once a month. Knowing when the wolves will come,
the postman rides his mule to the wall
at daybreak, as the frozen marshlands raise a gray smoke
to break the evening fast of black.

William Robert Flowers was born in rural western Tennessee. He holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and is currently attending the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he is enrolled in the MFA program with a concentration on poetry. He has had work published in Poetry Miscellany, Hunger Mountain, and Great River Review. He lives in Wilmington with his wife, Megan.

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