John Balaban, author of Empires (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), has written numerous other books of poetry, as well as fiction, nonfiction, and Vietnamese translations, and his work has been awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Prize, a National Poetry Series selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Balaban lives with his wife and daughter in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he teaches at North Carolina State University.

Photograph by Carolla Clift.

Four Poems

by John Balaban


Coyote Past Sunset

Finally, after a day of tailing trucks,
the highways loud with tire whine and bumper glare,
he got onto a blacktop running south to Mexico,
just him in the pickup, and off in the desert, dust devils
swirling through greasewood, ruffling vultures squatting
on fence posts, wings spread, sunning their black capes
as dust skipped past them whipping up grit around the odd horse
or pronghorns grazing with cattle, as he sped on
past hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fences.

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