Tigers traipse
the sidelines

jostle you, sleep
on the hood of your car.

You wake to feel
brilliance, prodigy,
growling possibility

like a comet you
stare at
sideways,
a hint of claw scratch

just enough
to know it’s there.

Carol L. Deering has twice received the Wyoming Arts Council Poetry Fellowship (2016, judge Rebecca Foust; 1999, judge Agha Shahid Ali). Her poetry appears in online and traditional journals, and in the recent anthology Blood, Water, Wind & Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi Press). https://www.caroldeering.com.