How Will I Know You [For months]
For months
the hot canopy screamed
A sonar pinged
but at what
We had stopped
talking to each other
The storm door
slammed
You flew right
at me, dumb
graceless I forgot
to flinch
I pulled You out
from my hair
Bronze wings
five red eyes
Expect Damn All
You said
Expect You
I said
I didn’t
My dogs ate You
My dogs, who are also You
Copyright © 2026 by Rebecca Gayle Howell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 31, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I have a few acres in Kentucky, a wildness bigger than me. ‘How Will I Know You’ is one in a sequence of devotional poems that carry the same title, in which all beings of that place are experienced as the We, both dangerous and divine.”
—Rebecca Gayle Howell
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Rebecca Gayle Howell is the author of Erase Genesis (Project Poëtica/Bridwell Press, 2026); American Purgatory (Black Springs Press Group, 2017); and Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013), selected by Nick Flynn for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. She is also the librettist of A Winter Breviary (Oxford University Press, 2022) for the composer Reena Esmail.