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“You can meet a devil at a crossroads.”
-Joy Harjo

You can testify. How everyone is deceiving themselves to death. My heart a tomb—sulfuric dreams, memories of eating figs—the pain of molars making skylights in the vacated tunnels of wasps. Tell me how old you were when you realized your parents were wolves. I know about tending—how we take 66 days to form a habit and supposedly, goats get it in 28. My horns are trouble—wasteful choices sheathed in leather. You can ask me about heartache, the many forks and one-ways inside my mouth. Where are you hiding your pain? I know about old skins; the countless sunsets left to bear. You can rub a toad’s underbelly. I will say nothing about how you extract the pit from forbidden fruit. Expecting temptation, you will say anything.

A woman so vast

                                        

Ruth barrels toward me in short bursts, cranks her manual lens toward what was the sea. Her feet form the tip of the Sawatch Mountains. A woman so vast carries her mass along her spine, rests her legs upon condyles. Her council is a ring of apparitions sitting around an unwelcome fire, one she wafts & spreadswith her fecund hands. Though my ancestors have stuffed her esophagus full of concrete, she peppers her skin with mountain sheep, lets them toughen her with calcium when they pass. I put my fingers on Ruth’s neck, but she doesn’t move. Perhaps if I stay she’ll squirm away like a dune or a river. When I summit, I know I have never achieved anything so worthwhile. My legs burn as I braid game trails back down, look straight into the barrel of her lens.