Emily Van Kley, a finalist in Narrative’s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of the collections The Cold and the Rust, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and Arrhythmia. Her work has also received the Loraine Williams Prize for Poetry and has been included in the anthologies Best New Poets and Best American Poetry. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and lives in Olympia, Washington.

Hunting Season

by Emily Van Kley

Having shot your first deer,
cut toward its warm center,
sip a bit of blood. Girls
who do this inch in, are grudged.
For boys the threat is rubied,
I mean refusal. Always one,
always the other—we tend

our categories most tenderly.
People on couch
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