Ira Sadoff's poems have appeared in Best Poems of 2002, have been awarded the Leonard Shestack Prize, the Pushcart Poetry Prize, and the George Bogin Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the Iowa Writers Workshop, and currently teaches at Colby College.

"The Soul" The shaft of narrative peers down. The soul's a petrified fleck of partridge this October. Mud-spattered, it thinks it's brush, it thinks it's one with the brush when God aims just below its feathers. It's too late to raise the soul, some ossified conceit we use to talk about deer as if we were deer, to talk about the sun, as if the cold autumn light mirrored our lover asleep in the tub. Nevertheless, I want to talk about it. Those scarred bodies on the hospital table, they're white chalk children use to deface the sidewalk. The deer fed in the gazebo, where the salt lick was barely safe from the fox. And when the wind didn't drag my scent to her, I sat listless, half-awake, and watched her hunger surpass her timidity. I should have been changed. I should have been startled into submission by a very white light, I should have shed my misgivings as her tongue made that sticky sound on the lick and two startled animals stared into what St. Francis called a mystery. I should bring her back, the woman too, the woman who what why words fail me here. I should sanctify the hospital gown as it slides down the tunnel of the catscan, to see where the nodules have spread into the thin, pliable tissues we call the innards in animals, because they dwell in scenery, they're setting for the poem, they provide a respite from the subject who's been probed and lacerated, who's been skinned and eaten away by the story when I'm beguiled by the music the hooves made on the pine floor. I can bring her back, can't I, I'm bringing him back, the hero who was close enough so I could watch what was inside his face hover and scatter.