Penelope Scambly Schott

October snow
down to the lower slopes of the mountain,
the brown hills of fall,

boys in their football helmets
busy running drills,
this lighted sign for Homecoming Week—

come home.

Or if this little town never was your home,
say you grew up someplace far away,
come anyhow.

I will bake an apple pie in a blue pie pan,
polish my grandma’s silver napkin ring
for your ironed white napkin.

When you arrive, when I hug you this hard
against my breasts, I will never confess
how much I needed you.

David J. Rothman

John Macker

my ritual sit, silently between two futon sleeping dogs
blue sky scraped dry by north winds, vernal equinox at
9 p.m. last night, but I didn’t detect a seismic shift in my
methodical ruin
                                a northern flicker blown in today fastidiously
circumnavigates a sumac branch, his theatre of self, a loud klee-yer.
Spring was the only season that could make Persephone blush.
The skinny woman who lives across the street went into detox,
her helicopter pilot neighbor drops in to feed the stricken dogs.

Just beneath the surface the mundane is aflame with tyrannical spirit,
frayed flags and red-eyed sleepless winters
                                                                               we lost our tracks
somewhere concealed under snow, we lost track of
the soul’s resurrected red dusks, our fellow Americans
armed and concealed behind their shiverings⸺

I hope future extra-terrestrials speak Hopi or jazz
follow migrant trails into sweetened by rain ocotillo deserts
or into undersea mouths of speechless volcanos and have
mad visions of peace on earth
                                                        where every track a flower
every flower a cicada song that vanquishes the next
unheard of war, with its cease fires of troubled
sleep while Sandhill cranes lift off the bosque
legs dangling like antennae
high above

our ashes harried by the wind.

***

A lone scrub jay breaks the air
over a pot of sagging zinnias,
the tiny Indian Summer suns fill the
disturbed earth with light.
The silence wakens with a start.

I learned corvids have sensory consciousness,
rituals, curiosity, bully pulpits,      but a raven
won’t look at war and wonder, if God finds us
will he desert us?

A raven didn’t fly in just for the countdown
at Trinity Site or to nest in Oppenheimer’s hat.

I look around the sky and cannot imagine a poem
I’d want used to train AI, but in time they’ll
be able to train a crow to vote with its conscience,
I’m sure of it⸺
                         a vote for corvids is a vote for fun.

Today, the world has that omnivorous look in its eye.
Stellar’s jays will never lead a horse to water
but they’ve inhabited my fever dreams, my
aislings, my lullabies for more years than
I can count
                  with their Indian Summer flocks
                          their untrained presences of mind.

***

waning moon at dawn
feathery logjam of clouds
grey wolf’s river howl

Patricia Dubrava

for Kathleen Cain

On a September morning two moths fold
their wings within the front door window curtain.
I place the jar kept for this purpose over them,
one at a time. They obligingly flutter inside
and I take them out to resume their journey
back to Nebraska.

At least, I think that’s where they’re going.
In the spring they migrate through Denver on their way
to the mountains. More go west than return east in the fall,
a routine outcome of the natural world.
 
Being my authority on all questions of the moon,
cottonwood trees, native flora and fauna, Kathleen could
verify this. In a neighborhood meeting on turning
the last farmland into a park, she once asked,
“May I say a few words on behalf of the prairie grasses?”

Kathleen’s in Nebraska now, seeing her baby sister through
to the end, an office older sisters should not hold.
My baby brother, born when I was ten, has been gone
more years than he lived. September’s the birth month
of that skinny child who ran to leap into my arms
when I came home from college.
It is an old sorrow, softened at the edges, tucked away.

Kathleen wipes her sister’s face with a warm cloth,
hugs her, talks to her, in Nebraska, where these moths want to go.
Being there is grief itself but also a blessing. My brother died alone:
that edge of my old sorrow still keen.

When I lift the jar lid, the moths fly out of sight in an instant,
though I marvel at how such tiny wings carry them so far—
so far and back again.

***

You pace south to north, north to south
and I see you from my second story window
in glimpses between garages
but see enough to know your youth,
your slenderness, your long, red-tinted locs
pulled back tight in a high ponytail
that cascades down your back
and sways as you turn.
I see this, pretty girl,
when you pace north and turn south again.
I wouldn’t have seen you at all
were you not screaming into your phone,
causing me to rise from my desk.
At the top of your voice, you yell:
Why do you keep doing this to me?
Why do you keep doing this to me?
You know I love you.
You know I love you.

I hear your words because you repeat
everything half a dozen times
as you turn north or go back south.
I imagine going to the alley, telling you:
before you were born, I was with a man
of whom I asked that question,
over and again:
Why do you keep doing this to me?
Here’s what I know: He won’t change.
Hang up on him, pretty girl.
You could find someone else, someone
you wouldn’t have to scream at while pacing
my alley for forty minutes that seem forever.
But you won’t. I didn’t.
In your froth of hysteria, that’s the last thing
you need—an old white woman
appearing out of nowhere to tell you what to do.
Don’t tell me you don’t care,
don’t tell me you don’t care, 
you scream and I nod—it may be years,
it may be never, until you realize,
this time, this one time,
he’s telling the truth.

***

for Patti Bippus

On the flat roof the prickle
of sun-struck adobe wall warms my back.
Like the in and out of surf
caressing a pebbled shore,
wind in pines rises and falls,
chorused by Deer Creek’s run
through its elbowed path below.

On the far side of this valley,
aspens wink whitely in morning sun, 
the smoky haze of their bare branches
marking a border between palomino pasture
and green pines climbing upslope.

A gang of ravens gabbles from tree to tree.
In the house, faint ticking of heat registers,
the greedy crackle of fire, and no word spoken
these several sweet hours since breakfast.

You sit at your easel in the sunbathed porch
and I do not look, knowing I would cover
this page should anyone approach,
protecting the fragility of work in progress:
what is not yet owned cannot yet be given.

When I climbed the spiral to the roof,
an angry buzzing increased.
The tower windows were full of flies
hatched from eggs laid in ceiling vigas.
Alarmed at my presence, they swirled
around me till I flung open the rooftop door,
and like so many pent-up ideas,
they burst into the blue.

Suzanne Bassinger

Yesterday a dry canal.
Today—full-bellied, aching to spill Wyoming
snowmelt over dry Nebraska pastures.

You pay your dues, claim your allotment.
Call the ditchrider to open your headgate.
For two weeks you will move your water
every 8 hours. For two weeks you will walk
your field, shovel on shoulder, boots to thighs,
drag orange tarps and old fenceposts to
make a dam, turn out the flow, walk your field,
find the dry spots, avoid the badger holes that
steal it all, move your water, drag your tarp,
set a dam, shovel a notch, or find last years old one
because you’re tired, it’s late and
in 8 hours you’ll be back to move the water.
To walk your field, set your dam, shovel
a notch, turn out the flow.

For you—the cows low at the fence,
smelling the water, dreaming of grass.

***

You armored me with the Carhartt badge worn
by farmers, utility workers, auto mechanics.
I loved the secret lingerie
of the chorus-girl red taffeta lining
whispering as I slipped into
the manliness of faded black-to-gray
rough canvas bib overalls sporting
frayed heels, manure stains, barb-wire
tears from sagging fences.
Loved to clasp your buckles
over my shoulders, pull zipper
from belly to chest, stride
out into the day. Invincible.

I could laugh at negative
Fahrenheit, wind chill warnings, boot-deep snow.
Walk fearless into the February morning
bucking-horse-cold feedings, mid-day negative
Fahrenheit ice-breaking of water troughs,
and then: the evening music
of frost-backed horses nickering
for the chilled grass hay, lots of it,
to stoke their bellies through
the coming bone-cold night.

When it was all done, and ice clung
to my legs as I waded back
to the glowing house, I would unzip
and unbuckle. Smile as black canvas
slipped way to red taffeta.
Stand you frozen-legged over
the heater vent to thaw. To wait to hold me
again tomorrow morning. You gave me
invincible. Indestructible
Lined with chorus girl songs
of red taffeta.

Robert Cooperman

That bear-scarred demon thinks he can kindness
his way out of Hell by handing me coins,
laying a ratty blanket over me, trying to get me
to eat decent—to atone for his killing sprees
like he’s a snot-rag brat given to picking his nose.

Liquor’s all I need, though every once in a while
Sylvie’s biscuits and gravy go down smoother
than the ice cream Pa churned for the Fourth.

Cold don’t bother me, ‘cause I’ll be burning
in Hell soon, for the swaddled baby I left in a ditch
when I had my youth and looks, and thought
I’d found true love with Cliff Loomis,
that no-good rat, who’d told me to get rid of it.

Afterwards both that bairn and Cliff was gone,
the wee girl most likely into a bear’s belly,
but I hope not; and him, not even the dust
from his galloping away was still swirling. 
Rather than face the shame of returning
to that brothel, I slunk into this alley.

To dull the pain I drink, though the bad taste
of what I done liquor can’t varnish over;
that, and knowing Cliff still festers on this earth,
and ain’t paid, like I have in guilt, for my daughter.

If Sprockett’d find and kill him for me,
I’d gladly see Old One-Eye hauled out
of the Hell that’s waiting on us both.

***

Don’t ask me what gets into men
that they need to shoot each other
over some slight they can’t recall. 
Now, three more corpses for Boot Hill,
strangers: except to Mr. Sprockett,
who put them in the ground. 
One had a son, who claims
he’s no stomach for vengeance,
but I’ve no doubt we’ll hear more gunfire,
citizens scrambling, again, for refuge,
thinking Quarry isn’t a fit family town.

I thank the Lord I’ve no bairns
to wander between warring parties;
haven’t let a man drag me to the altar
like a sacrificial heifer:  free to stitch
dresses for ladies who crave to look,
as they say in New York City, “With it.”

Then, there’s Mr. Sprockett:
our Angel of Death, when he’s not reciting
poetry by the mile, tipping his hat
to all of us ladies, including soiled doves,
even the crazed hag who squats in an alley.

He’ll tuck a blanket around her,
hand her some coins for a meal she’ll drink,
while she mutters curses at his bear-savaged face,
her clothes worse than rags, but too proud
to let me fashion her a new sturdy dress
and overcoat, out of Christian kindness.

I rode with his Pa to bring slaughter
to Lawrence, Kansas; he never forgave me
for riding away afore we’d killed every soul
in that Abolitionist paradise.  Still, that massacre
was the worst thing I ever did,
and I did plenty Jesus’ll send me to Hell for.

I’d tell his son Micah, when his Pa
and two others came gunning for me
years later, I’d no choice but to backshoot them,
waiting to gun me, sure as Pharisees
of their righteousness.  I didn’t give them
the chance, crept in through the back
silent as a puma, and let them have it.

Now his son hangs about town,
when anyone with a lick of sense
would’ve rode off or blown out my lamp
first chance he got.  But he fell hard
as a landslide for Spanish Sally,
her hair black as an anthracite seam,
her face to melt the heart of Satan. 
Out of kindness she tried to get him to leave,
but between his wanting to kill me
and pestering her, he’s stuck here.

Only way I can get him out of town and safe
from the roaring murder that comes over me
with the power of seven prairie twisters
is to pay off Sally’s debt to her madam,
but knowing Sally, she’ll gut him like a trout
right after she’s let him do the dirty
on the night he thinks will be the first
of their long, happy life together.

Maybe kinder just to shoot him
and put him out of his misery quick.

David Anthony Martin

After the stridex pad, and the toothbrush,
the mouthwash and melatonin,
the cat watches me from his bedside basket
taking off my pants and socks 
putting on very loose, thin sweatpants
removing the days shirt, slipping into another
equally as loose fitting and thin

[…]

What must he think of this routine
night after night with no knowledge that we die
only of life—the hunt for small birds or mice,
the sunny spot on the rug—its slow passage 
beneath the window beyond the houseplants,
the proper time for wet-food dinner

[…]

What a bizarre spectacle I must be
removing a layer, donning another,
slipping under the blankets,
reading till sleep overtakes me
and the anxiety of work tomorrow,
of everything undone yet to be done,
ever undone again, and to do again,
to do tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow

***

Moving through the gloom of the dark
pillared temple of the forest at night
I can feel it in my knees, a cold stiff blade, 
smallness that sits sedimentary in my lungs 
a gift horse with teeth, a mare pulling me
through the night, stumbling briefly on a limb
I flush a fox that veers away, agile reflexes,
it springs atop a low stone wall, practically
flows from the ground smoothly to perch
the grace of its tail, a soft serpentine whisk
confident it is as far from any danger
as it needs to be for the moment, it is red
although some subtle swatch it is to me
in grayscale tones, my night vision, reads
red in my mind from the white tip of its tail
It turns to look me in the eye, before flowing
away, vanishing into the forest’s deeper tones
where I will not be following it tonight, instead
I will sit in my own den, to find the medicine 
by reading what is hidden between the lines

***

drowning out the sound
of the creek and chickadees
my thoughts
clouding this moment
of sun-sparkling frosted pines
my thoughts
walking and walking
today’s recipe calls for the feet
hurting more than my heart

Megan de Guzman

The girls feel sexy in hiking boots,
earth caked into their soles.
They climb fast to get their heart rates up
and feel the sweat drippin’ down their necks.
They love breathin’ heavy
and flushin’ their faces pink.
It reminds them of sex.
They like to sit in their stink for days
and bathe in rivers or lakes.
The girls want to get lost in the woods,
so that when they die,
they’ll decompose right into the dirt
and grow into something demanding and phallic, 
like a big, fat redwood tree.
Then they’ll grow and grow
and always take up space.

George McWhirter

We still live close by here
as settlers
on unceded Musqueam land.

When we came here, the totems
lay, losing their faces to the knives
of whittlers and to rot in the small
copse. An asbestos shed stood
for some attempt at restoration,
but seemed more an abattoir
for the icons of clan animals
than a carver’s workshop.

Saw marks in the place of faces
showed where some had been
taken off and the scavenged
masks hung on some wall.
Only the brown bear’s
giant cedar body
stayed as it was carved
for any kid to climb on,
but the place made us feel
as if we had walked back in time
to see the village of the city’s childhood
razed, the long house, the door totems
― stripped of recognition,
turned into a cemetery
of lost identities.

***

The old couple in the back of the boat,
they never spoke, they only smoked.
Were they the wise pair of the waves,
the elderly sirens of silence?

We looked at the derelict stacks
of the old tobacco factory―
conical brick, 19th century monuments
to the relics that hung from our smokers’
mouths.

Were they Don José and Carmen,
who married and lived, faithfully,
silently smoking on a memory,
till the tobacco factory died?

Our sea tour turned around an almost
bygone addiction, love, and cigarettes,
except here, west of Malaga, whose
erstwhile industry, Malagueños
say, Bizet transplanted to Seville
for better ambience and PR.

Is it true, and are these two on the backboard
ghosts — their cigarette smoke, twin plumes
of impotence that will never haunt the thief
who purloined their story, leaving them
to float speechless and forever in the stern
of a small, blue, harbour-tour boat?

***

Here, I come, cresting as slow as Rosinante and Sancho Panza’s donkey
above the dunes at Tarifa and Sta. Catalina’s tail, laid on the water
with a castle at the end, no longer poised to sting with red, white
and black cannon fire in the duel of the dual blues
that divide and define the Med from the Atlantic,
and Spain from England, later, at Gibraltar.

What must I have looked like, beside you, in my creeping,
crawling old age — not unlike Quixote of the sad face, tied
by imperious script to an inky torture of captivity with one,
who will grow, incrementally in everyone’s mind, to be my fat,
loving partner — always at my irascible beck and itchy elbow
to mind me through my flibbity-gibbet-ous digressions.

This is what reading myself into Cervantes has made me:
random in my mind as driftwood off the sea. Still, the old,
widow-weedy crone by the quay believed we were come
to arbitrate because there is a war, here, over the water
for the wind: fishermen, pestering for el poniente,
out of the west and off the sea; the wind taken out of their sails,
pirated by the prayers of windsurfers, who invoke the wicked
levante, out of the east and overland.
If I were Quixote, which wind ought I to quell, whom should I support:
the fishermen’s wives in church each morn, keening for a wind
to drive their husbands home, or the gaggle of ill-clad girls with their wind-
worshipper’s faces, dustier than the moor’s.

We climb the mane of the mountain
from their duskiness into a deeper dusk, to debate the opposing winds;
the contentious waters and two competing blues: Atlantic turquoise
and Mediterranean blue of bruised history,
too deep to dilute, pouring on to Ilium.

High on the cliff-face, my own face dropping like a spade,
I encounter the giant, steel-grey knights of the four
rotating swords building momentum for a thrust
at the billboard-bull of one, Pedro Domecq,
behind whose beastly effigy, real ones waltz,
snort and ruffle the grass as they graze
on the wildflowers of a hinterland demesne. 

I am told by my Panza that the knights are posted here
to cure Spain’s halitosis and kill the dragon, Dirty Energy,
that gargles coal and spits Repsol gas
into any car or kitchen that kindles with the turn of a key.

Tilting at the air with flexi-directional blades,
I encounter a truth as turquoise clear as the Atlantic:
the windmill has become Quixote.

Thomas Reeve

Diving south from White River
I tried to outsmart the coming storm.
Lightning cracks across
the back of the Black Hills.
Once sacred, now white.
Settled by
purveyors of trinkets and trash.
Three men sit outside a liquor store
at the edge of town
sipping Forties.
Forgotten warriors.
Booze is illegal on the Rez
but the border towns oblige.
Open early, close late.
Low clouds blow fast.
Driving through seams of ancient sandstone
On this barren blacktop ribbon.
Sandhills. Badllands.
Doublewides sit square
and squat against the relentless wind.
Two pit bulls tied to a tree.
A small trike turned over in in a driveway.
Rusted cars in a yard.
A small bird hits the windshield.
One claw wraps the radio antenna
and the small body is impaled,
wings spread,
stuck with me
flying across this empty place.
Hills rise and fall like waves.
A herd of buffalo crests the horizon
running with their tongues cut out.
A memory
of genocide by starvation.
A flock of crows fly north
each with a bloomed rose in its beak.
They drop them as they fly.
Petals fall like dead dreams.
They call this place Rosebud.

***

The last slow switchback
curling back toward home.
A quick bounce of slanted lights.
The fawn lying in her driveway.

                       Tires grab gravel.
                                    Quick stop.
                                    Dust drifts in the beams
                                    like smoke.
It looks dead.
Rusty red from the cab.
Venus burns a hole
in a shrouded sky.
                                    Door creaks and slams.
                                    A hand on fur.
                                    Still warm.
                                    Mountain lion.
More tan than red
when kneeling close.
Round nubs on the skull.
Button buck.
Would have been a beautiful boy.

Engine sounds.
Owl songs.
Hair crawls.
                                    Is the cat still there?
She grabs two legs.
Drags him to the trees.
Tiny hooves shine
black like wet stones.
The doe,
                                    a still, staring eye reflecting
green in the headlights.
                                    Just behind the Ponderosa pine.

***

Buffalo Creek

SEE THE WILD BUFFALO! I’ll follow the signs. Roll into a parched gravel lot. Two paint-peeled pumps. Three rib-thin buffalo in a pen. Hand-scrawled sign says pay before you pump. Walk towards a screen door dust devils swirling at my side. It’s okay! An old man shouts, No prepay! The pump grinds on and I go inside. He sits behind a sheet metal desk, black binoculars around his neck. I check out all the cars and decide he says. You’re good. Smiles. Tobacco yellow teeth. A Ford F-150, two dogs, and a white man must be keys to the kingdom here. We watch a silver Audi pull in. Caramel skin and a sonorous river of black hair spill from the door. Heat shimmers in blurred waves around her. Hands on hips, ass wrapped tight in white leggings. She reads the sign and looks carefully towards the door. She gotta pay first he says.

Rest Stop

In S.D. the rest stops are all marked with skeleton sticks of imagined tepees. We burned all the real ones. I have been a migratory bird for fifty years. Back and forth to Minnesota where my father, 90 now, still can’t say I love you. Never did push his grandkid on a swing. I stopped here 25 years ago when my son was five. Rolling with the Lion King. He stood in front of the car, where a Monarch butterfly was pressed dead on the grill, its orange wings still perfect. It’s the circle of life he said. Hakuna Matata baby. For the rest of your days.

Scenic

Dropping through the Badlands for decades. A desert bighorn ram stood perched on a ridge. Tan on red sandstone. Setting sun lit striations in the uplifted rocks. Only one bar/restaurant in Scenic. 20 or so motorcycles and some trucks in the lot. We sat down, single dad raising two kids. Better order simple here, burgers, cokes, fries. Yes okay grilled cheese is fine. At the bar, framed by a red Budweiser sign, she sat looking at our out-of-place little clan. Black leather vest and pants. White shirt. Tats and silver earrings. She was the most beautiful, strongest, bravest, saddest, and loneliest woman in the world.

Wounded Knee

A place too poor to even have a proper monument. Just an old yurt with pictures inside. All the chiefs. A mass grave. Ghosts of the hundreds that died. I bought a carved antler tip key ring from an old man. Thick gray braids and a turquoise bolo tie. Climbed the hill where the slaughter began. A dry creek bed snaked below. Old trucks, a tent kitchen, Indian flatbread. Sat in a circle with some strangers and passed a peace pipe around.

Driving West

For children, time is a heavy chain. Just wait just wait just wait until you are older. Now I am older. Farm towns. Withered, dying. No more winking waitresses or bustling harvest sounds. Main street stores have plywood eyes. Only the sound of rats’ feet and pigeon wings inside. Two dark bars. Men in John Deere caps drink early. Gimme Jack and Coke. Gimme Johnny Walker Black, beer back. Survivors. Nothing runs like a Deere. One gas station. I drive west. Still wondering if you love me. Time chases me into a lake full of memories. I’ll swim there till I drown.

***

The small creek below the barn
runs fast and hard in March
when mother bears rise blinking from their dark dens
and winter-born cubs squint in a new, wondrous world
of green leaves and aspen trees.
Walking to the barn,
I listen to water roll across rocks
and hear hungry horses stir in their stalls.
Inside, I drink the sweet smell of hair and hay,
then stop
in the sudden stillness
of sensed memories.
Springtime is no blessing for a horse.
They stand still and trembling in their stalls,
ears laid back like rabbits in short grass.
Nostrils flare with awakened worries
of bears walking in the moonlight.