now grayalmost like smokefeeling its wayagainst the windmy father glides over& you let himsteal your brightflag of furto his chestnuzzling you so closeit almost feelswrongwatching his knucklesgo softwithout shamewith a lovehe’s shown meonly oncethe nightI pawned his gold ring& after getting my fixreturnedto his armshe embraced meso closeI tasted his wine-breath& we were no longera tangleof two fiendish menbut becameugly & tearfulfinding in the otheran animalneither could hold.
The Coming of Fox
Bernardo Wade
after Lucille Clifton
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“The Coming of Fox” from A Love Tap (Lookout Books, 2025). Copyright ©2025 by Bernardo Wade. Reprinted here with permission of Lookout Books, University of North Carolina Wilmington. This poem first appeared in The Sewanee Review.
Born & raised in New Orleans, Bernardo Wade tries at poems, catches elbows on the court, wanders around the Bay—occasionally on Stanford’s campus as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Previously the Editor of Indiana Review, he now serves as Assistant Editor and Poetry Editor for Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. & though he’s published in a bunch of literary journals no one in his family has ever heard of, they remain proud of him, especially when they are featured in the poems. Check out his first full-length poetry collection, A Love Tap, from Lookout Books of UNC-Wilmington. He’s infatuated with Ed Roberson’s question, “Can you O.D. on life?”
Winter 2025
Sewanee, Tennessee
University of the South
Editor
Adam Ross
Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith
Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite
Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.
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