a close-reading of logan february's  ​a  boy  cries  wolf

The following poem originally appeared in Winter Tangerine's Beyond the Breadcrumbs issue

& his jaw doesn’t leave the ground for four whole days.


meanwhile, the trees curve their shadows around him.
meanwhile, the moon doesn’t leave the sky. meanwhile,
the raven's nest in his hair. the whole village stands back.


the mother with her pitchfork, the father with his beckoning torch.


they are all glittering & dressed in black. no one speaks.
the boy keeps crying wolf & hearing silence. the wolf lies dead
behind him, but the boy won’t turn around, won’t look at it,


so the wolf lies dead & the boy keeps crying. he cries –
/wolf are you there/ /wolf did you leave me/


/wolf wolf wolf/ & his mother cries too, but quiet.


the crickets want to be moths & the moths want to be crickets.
the torches dance left & right. the insects’ shadows are cast like
small transient spells. the wolf lies dead & the boy lies too,


cries – /wolf/ & there is no more running. he clamps his teeth
around his wrist, arching himself in a rabid rapture. blood spills &
tastes the earth. the boy cries – /did you stop loving me wolf/


the boy cries –

​Logan February is the author of two chapbooks, Painted Blue with Saltwater (Indolent Books), and How to Cook a Ghost (Glass Poetry Press). His website is  https://www.loganfebruary.com/ and he can be found on Twitter @loganfebruary. A Nigerian poet, his debut full-length collection, Mannequin in the Nude, is forthcoming from PANK Books in 2019.

"A boy cries wolf" was originally published in Winter Tangerine's Beyond the Breadcrumbs issue. Check out more of the work that Winter Tangerine has to offer here.

close reading

by Alegrarse Staff

​In the poem “A Boy Cries Wolf,” Logan February subverts the well-known fable into a new exploration of characters present in the narrative. The images he presents borrow from the familiarity of the trope that the children’s tale presents, yet remain hauntingly strange in their execution. This inherently places his work in conversation with the original story, beckoning a disorientation of the reader almost immediately as the poem begins.

The title of the poem bleeds into the first line, and it is worth noting that identity is the first thing that can strike the reader’s attention. Obviously riffing on “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” February’s poem is titled “A Boy Cries Wolf.” While the original story seeks to clarify its protagonist as the boy who cried wolf (the crying, a singular event), the poet seems uninterested in doing this. The boy in the story is synonymous with his wrongdoing, unable to separate himself from the harm he caused. Yet, in February’s work, the tense shift of the word “cry” subtly allows us to expand upon the character of the boy. We are witnessing a boy at his gentlest, a pleading to be understood, a desire for help, even mercy.

It is the very same shifting of tenses that guides the introduction of the poem as well. February writes:
    
                                        "& his jaw doesn’t leave the ground for four whole days.
        
        
                                          meanwhile, the trees curve their shadows around him.
        
                                          meanwhile, the moon doesn’t leave the sky. meanwhile,
         
                                          the raven's nest in his hair."

Continuing off of the idea that different verb tenses identify methods of understanding time, which in turn implicate alternative meaning, the poet berates the reader with the first onslaught of strange imagery. Time is the central victim here, and the first image, "A boy cries wolf /// & his jaw doesn't leave the ground for four whole days," is arguably the most confusing, or at least, the most ambiguous, in the poem. This is because, instead of expanding upon or exploring this image, February uses it to set up the following images, pulling our attention away from the narrative of the poem and instead towards his fixation on the passage of time. We accept that four whole days are passing, yet the stillness that February writes, as seen by the jaw not leaving the ground, is abruptly so different than the four days in the original tale, in which the boy cries wolf three times over three days, and is punished for his lies on the fourth day, when an actual wolf does in fact appear. Despite this accepted, new timeline, February forces to consider the absurdity of this image. He writes that "the trees curve their shadows around him" and "the moon doesn't leave the sky." It is as if the entire world is proceeding, and the boy remains almost cartoonishly frozen. As our understanding of the imagery present in this poem becomes more and more murky, the refrain "meanwhile" does substantial work. It introduces a form of parallelism, in which we understand the action of the boy's surrounding nature: the curving and uncurving of the shadows of trees as the sun inevitably rises and sets, and the moon's odd stillness, its inaction still being verbed into a form of action. The third image brings this to a halt, however, as it is not a raven nesting itself into the boy's hair, an image reminiscent of a scarecrow, but a "raven's nest in his hair." If one were to hear this poem read aloud, they might miss the shift from describing events that were happening to the boy to events that are happening to the boy. February brings this poem into the "now" by leaving action, and beginning current, realtime description. "The raven's nest in his hair," is explicitly not "the ravens nest in his hair." Here, "nest" is not a verb, but is most akin to an adjective, describing the present.

It is this stillness that we begin to understand as a terrifying form of paralysis. Suddenly, everything around the boy is still, and, being watched by an entire village, he is the only one in the poem demonstrating any kind of emotion, any kind of response to the slaughtering of the wolf:
     
                                                                                       "the whole village stands back.
         
   
                                         the mother with her pitchfork, the father with his beckoning torch.

    
                                         they are all glittering & dressed in black. no one speaks.
         
                                         the boy keeps crying wolf & hearing silence. the wolf lies dead

                                         behind him, but the boy won’t turn around, won’t look at it,
      
                                          so the wolf lies dead & the boy keeps crying."

At this point in the poem, it is unclear why the boy is so affected by the death of the wolf. Despite this, we see for the first time any kind of action from the boy, even it is simply mourning. Yet, even though we are now able to witness this, it is clear that while the boy can speak, he remains physically immobile.
         
                                                                                                                         he cries –
    
                                            /wolf        are you there/         /wolf        did you leave me/
       
                                          /wolf        wolf        wolf/        

It is unclear if the boy is unable to turn around because of physical limitations on his form, or if he is so terrified at the prospect of his vision confirming what his intuition knows to be true, that the wolf is dead and he is helpless. It is this helplessness that drives the rest of the poem, as February expands his exploration of shifting from solely time to an exploration of shifting in terms of identity, and action.
     
                                          "the crickets want to be moths & the moths want to be crickets.
      
                                         the torches dance left & right. the insects’ shadows are cast like

                                         small transient spells. the wolf lies dead & the boy lies too,"

This is the second moment in which torches and shadows are brought into the poem, and it is now clear why. February is so cleverly weaving dualities throughout the poem: the crickets and moths; the light of the flame and the shadow cast by it; the boy and the wolf. Everything wants to be something that it is not, but in the case of the boy and the wolf, this has substantial meaning. This is not the same carefree, troublemaking boy that we know from the original story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," but rather the boy after he has cried. Four days have passed, and the wolf is dead. The boy is reckoning with the guilt of having caused another living thing to die. The poem is exploring an alternative ending, in which the wolf never killed any of the sheep, or even if it did, it doesn't matter, since the wolf, which the boy had been so fixated upon, is now dead. The implication that the boy wishes he would take the place of the wolf is beyond tragic. This is an abrupt end to the arc of the boy, who no longer has a wolf to cry. Because of this, the narrative suddenly shifts, and becomes a search for meaning. The boy recognizes that his own perception of his own meaning has been vanquished along with the wolf.

In the original story, the wolf, despite killing the sheep of the villagers, remains a relatively insignificant part of the tale. What February is doing with this poem is almost Anne Carson-eqsue (in reference to An Autobiography of Red), in its expansion of the minute, its exploration of mercy, of meaning. The line "the wolf lies dead & the boy lies too" seems to reference the original story, wherein the boy's lying is the central focus. Yet, in this poem, it is the laying down, the descension, the death, that is at the crux of the boy and the wolf's story. February brings the wolf to the forefront of the narrative, yet stays strong with the conviction that the wolf's death is a definitive ending. 
        
                                                                                                           he clamps his teeth
        
                                       around his wrist, arching himself in a rabid rapture. blood spills &
    
                                       tastes the earth. the boy cries – /did you stop loving me        wolf/
         
         
                                      the boy cries –
                    
The poem's ending is abrupt, unfinished, as represented by the emdash it concludes upon. This only serves to further the claim that the boy's meaning has vanished, that he, along with the wolf, knows not what to do when confronted with death, in such a devastating situation. While the original story focuses only on consequence, February seeks to explore the intimate. He is fascinated by the prospect of unexplored pain, of longing, of identity, and a search for purpose. This re-telling of a classic tale is marvelous, rich with the meaning that the boy who cried wolf so desperately requires.

​Logan February is the author of two chapbooks, Painted Blue with Saltwater (Indolent Books), and How to Cook a Ghost (Glass Poetry Press). His website is  https://www.loganfebruary.com/ and he can be found on Twitter @loganfebruary. A Nigerian poet, his debut full-length collection, Mannequin in the Nude, is forthcoming from PANK Books in 2019.

"A boy cries wolf" was originally published in Winter Tangerine's Beyond the Breadcrumbs issue. Check out more of the work that Winter Tangerine has to offer here.