Creeland. Dallas Hunt

      care, even though being “impaired” is when one actually might need care.

      a “disorienting event” exacerbated by the police leaves you forever changed when life itself isn’t over but “the life you knew is.”

      a brain perforated a chronic limp a stark message that being “detained” or containment is the essence of your existence in these spaces, as though detainment is supposed to feel like a welcoming blanket wrapped around a mallet meant to pulverize, like they “stole four and a half years” of your life because routine check-ups and adequate items for sleep are not needed cause they never work and, rarely, if ever, work as well, or feel as good to them as a mallet will.

      Porcupine II

      my kôhkom’s rib-cage plumage wrapped around a plum skeleton of barbed wire and electricity bones that catch in the throat of those that wish any of her grandchildren ill cartilage that bends but doesn’t break bends and bends and bends until the slack tightens up and slaps white men in the face cumulus cloud that rumbles grey battering the side of houses gale winds that utter Cree like a caress and a threat (whisper like a brick wall) astam if you know what’s good for you

      Ada Street, Pocatello

      fashion shifts, silk trades end

      the (colonial) gateway to the northwest

      a benevolent misnomer Portneuf Gap more of a maw

      listed under services: park pavilions, dumpsters

      banks of mink, cities of daisies

      every road and website ends in a 502 gateway

      balled and burlapped, with soil covering the root flare

      leaves like lightning clusters hanging

      tree guides with soft but stern subheadings:

      prohibited as street trees, trees with significant problems

      and near the index, recommended shrubs

      a cut across the sky

      spatter chaperoned, snaking to your slight feet

      bundled, housed in a smile capital

      sawabi: the word for sagebrush

      Mahihkan

      wolf bones are tender, he said, and in that moment i believed him.

      we exited the vehicle, amazed at the travelling container of release and ruin that we had been riding in. Kia is Korean for murder, he joked. i didn’t laugh.

      somewhere behind the thickets, nestled between shrubs and budding Jack pines, lay wolf pups, wondering where their mother was and where this ache had come from.

      rarely do you see wolves by the highway, i say, and for a moment it looks like he might believe me.

      we trudge through the snow back to the compact car with the leather interior— it was a rental.

      Wahkohtowin

      on our

      window- sill

      sits a succulent, bending

      its stem

      to swallow the sunlight

      hunched over, desperate, it leans toward the glass, hoping to be filled like a Mason jar brimmed by a pouring spout— before the water rushes over

      how wonderful

      to be so dependent on another, how

      alarming, how terrifying

      and yet, what else is there to do, but to have our beings bound up in others, so restless, so full

      of thirst that we might spill over