#185 Anodyne by Gary Jackson

Bourbon in hand, you believe the world
will always be this strange
and wonderful. A dog barks by the pool
tables, you throw one thigh across my lap
and let your glass pull your hand against mine.
The dark honey crashes against the rim.
A waitress comes and asks if we’d like more.
We nod and raise our down
-ed glasses, before drowning. Want burns
our throats. The only thing to cool this is
to spit in my mouth before we smolder back
to clay. Outside, music dies as it stumbles
out of the club. Let us celebrate
how distant our bodies are from home,
how anything can be exotic: the street view
window, the cracked glass tabletops, our
own skin. Let tonight end somewhere in
foreign territory. Help me believe the lie:
that the world is too vast to ever be familiar.

—
Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Missing You, Metropolis, which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Tin House, Phoebe and elsewhere. He teaches at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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#184 Approaching Another New Year by Michelle Holland

November airs the trees out of their leaves,
they end up crispy brown barely hanging on,
or as a brown carpet blown here and there
by the suddenly rude autumn wind.
Little stories end in this dire season,
or begin, just like any other time of year.
Take the small charred perfect aspen leaf
that drifted into our driveway
from forty miles away, down the mountain
on the winds of the Los Conchas fire.
Later, the dog we adopted, beautiful, wild
young Ridgeback, survived the fire as well,
escaping on charred paws to end up here,
to tame himself at our safe house.

Take each life that ended this season,
friends and family, and the intricacies
that twine together in eulogy and memory:
summer camps with cousins, Moonie wings
of take offs and touch downs. Those who survive
embrace the photos, and the smallest sequence
of words that bring everything back.
Take the threats to the broccoli, Brussels sprouts,
corn, and in the early spring, the strawberries,
all diminished by squirrels, or aphids and grasshoppers.
We harvested anyway. In December we are eating tomatoes
ripened in three weeks of yesterday’s news.
Now, on the easel a new painting of the heirloom
varieties that appeared from green to ripe like magic.

“Moonie” is a type of small airplane, like a Cessna.

—

Michelle Holland lives and writes in Chimayo, New Mexico.  Her books include the New Mexico Book Award winning collection, The Sound a Raven Makes, Tres Chicas Press 2007; and Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press, 2009.

#183 ROCKFALL by Lori Romero

My friend, Annie, is a rock hound. Not the my-dad-bought-me-a rock-kit-when-I-was-eight kind of person, but a genuine hard piece of the earth fanatic. Her den looks like a mining expedition took over that part of the house. Annie’s unwavering enthusiasm finally persuaded me to abandon my usual Saturday slothful ways and join her on a hike through the juniper-piñon canyon of Rio de las Trampas. After a fifteen minute clamber, passing what I hoped was not bear or mountain lion droppings, we came upon an unexpected sight. A Noel Langley landscape. We found ourselves at the bottom of a boulder-lined bowl created by retreating glaciers. Thousands of rocks were stock-still, frozen in mid-tumble down the hill. The sight made me feel small and vulnerable.  I was hesitant to move lest I remind gravity of its job. Annie picked up a piece of stone and rubbed it in her hand.  It sparkled like an Oz slipper. The shadow of something large flew overhead as Annie and I collected samples of milky quartz, granite, gneiss, shale and pyrite. We picnicked near the curious formations, and let the sweet air and sun work its magic on our tired brains. Yellow yarrow lined the way to a spiraling waterfall roaring down the ravine. When it was time to head back home, I didn’t want to go.  On the steps of my apartment, I pulled out the stone Annie had pressed into my hand as a keepsake of our adventure. It was broken off from what it once was and heavy with the weight of wear, much like Dorothy on her return to Kansas.

—

Lori Romero is winner of the Spire Press Poetry Chapbook Competition for The Emptiness That Makes Other Things Possible.  Her first chapbook, Wall to Wall, is published by Finishing Line Press. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

#182 Party on Indian School and University by Matthew Jake Skeets

and all he thinks about are his brown, cracked
feet.  The dead skin and yellow nails slipped
into a pair of black no-shows, and the music pumps.
The kids’ pocket wrappers and crushed beer cans
almost began bouncing on the tattered carpet. And the lights
make him want to scream, the native boy sitting
on the coffee table thinking about parties on the rez.

How they smell so much the same, like beer breath
and nachos. They even say the same things, call him
pussy if he doesn’t want to drink. And he starts to wonder
boarding-school mothers, in their tight Levi jeans
and cowboy boots, line dancing in dirt, with a mix
of a drunken Macarena. And how they forget Navajos
weren’t supposed to drink, and in the morning
they lay on cold, morning-blue grounds, shirts torn,
somewhere in ditches.

The music fades into a slow dance as three couples
congeal on the tattered carpet.  Hormonal chants
about the missionary position, enticing the boys and girls
with powwows in their pants, dissolves the skin colors
of these kids, and no one is white anymore.
They are a greasy tint of cheap beer and 7-11 liquor.
Everyone zips in and out of bedrooms,
and someone dims the lights.

A translucent-skinned girl staggers towards
the sitting native boy, and she is wide-eyed,
like after Ghost Dance, ready for her stoic native,
feathered and buckskinned. The boy shifts his body
in surrender
and he feels her heavy tit in his palm and her hand
edging near his crotch.  And she starts sucking
on his bottom chapped lip, her body sweaty
with acceptance.

—

Matthew Jake Skeets is a Navajo, of the Black-Streak-Wood People, born for Water’s Edge. He is a fourth year student at the University of New Mexico and is from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. Writing and storytelling are in his blood.

#181 MIGRATION by Mina Yamashita

Five cranes crossed overhead, a good omen—a promise,
if you believe the legends of my ancestors.

They glide toward the Bosque del Apache,
their home and shelter in this desert place.
They go to sleep ere daylight slips beneath the cedar breaks.

Our intersect is but a lover’s tryst—a coming home to roost.

My forebears asked for the good fortune brought by cranes,
made their image into paper blessings—
prayers of offering to ancient shrines.

I live in the shadow of Los Alamos,
cradle of a people’s darkest nightmare,
origin of all life, torn asunder.

While blackened gardens lay in ashy silence,
I learned to pledge allegiance, and ignore
the havoc wrought by others on a distant shore.

A score of years before I learned my parents
had been caged like birds.
They didn’t tell that story, kept it close.

And now, I am a captive of New Mexico,
in love with its strange history and wild land,
in love with its red mountains, and its nesting birds.

Cranes will leave their nest if frightened in their vigil,
will not sanctify that ground again.
But humankind always looks back, never quite forgets.

We call on many places claiming birthright.
I make my homestead here with these great birds for neighbors,
a home for generations, a gift—some may call fortune.

I call it fortitude.
—

Award-winning graphic designer for 50+ years, Mina first studied printmaking and typography at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. In 2009, after 9 years as a senior book designer at UNM Press, wrote “Mina’s Dish” for Albuquerque’s Alibi for 18 months. She is now engaged in freelance writing, design, and illustration.

#180 I Would Rather We Ate Them by Page Lambert

Bittersweet, watching pigeons float
from the neighbor’s roof to my barren courtyard
in this new Santa Fe subdivision, lighting on store-bought bark
beside this transplanted Pyracantha, with its flame-orange berries
and stiff green branches.  Once, I did not know

That pigeons fed their newly hatched a creamy gruel—
from beak to beak the milk passes, those first few days—
from father and mother both, before flight feathers
unfurl, before the young loft and lift in search
of sprouting sun flowers and wild grasses.  Last spring

I leaned the shovel against the fake adobe wall where raucous
ravens, so black they were blue, paced less patient
than the cows my son once knew, even from a distance—each mother,
each calf, each face distinct. I spread fistfuls of store-bought topsoil
with my bare hands and did not know then that tax dollars, yours

And mine, were spent on poisoned corn, spread like candy
on courthouse rooftops, though not knowing had little to do
with the right or wrong of it. Too many pigeons
too much mess.  Better to haul their bloated bodies
to the landfills.  Too many to count,

I would rather we ate them—squab under glass, fed them
to our children at Thanksgiving, cooed back
at their cousins the mourning doves, perched two
by two on telephone wires that stretch, like a mother’s
longing, from Rancho Viejo to Ruidoso.

—

Page Lambert grew up in the Rock Mountains and feels at home in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.  Author of In Search of Kinship, her essays and poetry are widely anthologized. She has been leading outdoor adventures, writing seminars and workshops for 17 years. Connecting People with Nature. Connecting Writers with Words: www.pagelambert.com.

#179 Paloma Negra by Byron Aspaas

Looking through the looking glass the glass that shields
me from wind from rain from clouded sun poor bird
looking through the looking glass looking back at me stands
the statuesque strange stoic bird an empty hole where
its heart once beat poor strange bird a hole in its heart
holding heads connected to its feathers connected to its
shoulders staring back at me eight pounds on each fin
two heads swinging smiling poor empty strange bird
weighted down with nowhere to fly standing cold as
stone alone in mold near billows of smoke circling and
swirling processed scents of stale tobacco hollow
prayers poor empty weighted strange bird stares glares
looking at me through me judging you judging me
where I sit protected behind the looking glass poor cold
empty weighted strange bird odd shaped head
unfamiliar body shivering squeaking alone weighted
with stone prayers molded looking through the looking
glass the glass that shields me inside the glare behind
oily smudges reflect appear blank statuesque stoic
strange
me.
—

Byron Aspaas (Diné) is Tachiiníí and born for Todichííníí.  Currently a creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Byron writes poetry and creative nonfiction.  His ambition is to become a teacher, a writer, and most importantly a storyteller. He resides with his partner, Seth Browder, in Santa Fe, NM

#178 Lady Brett’s Cabin by Lou Amyx

My dear Virginia, where to begin?

The weeks since our arrival have been consumed
by joyous toil: coaxing a home from these homesteader’s shacks –
hardly more than stacked planks of handmilled Ponderosa –
rooved only by rusty sheets of raucous tin. How we scatter
the many-footed creatures that inhabit them!
A kind strong woman and two sunblackened men
churn straw and mud to plaster, split shingles and fence rails,
fire bricks, horseshoes, corn, and pillows of lovely warm tortillas.

We are all
hammering and painting and building our Rananim.
I find myself, at last, most comfortable here. My cabin has a chair,
and a table for writing, a teacup, saucer, and kerosene lantern.
My closet is a chest beneath a narrow wooden bed for one.
Three windows. The north is filled by the back of the Lobo,
arching skyward from where we ride the mountain’s shaggy flank.
The south descends into the infinite – the mysterious colored desert.
Today I tracked the roving dust of David’s climb up the Kiowa trail.
From Taos, he brought a darling woodstove, a mirror, and the mail
with your letter. Behind him, pursuing cloudbanks raced across
the windlashed plain – now my easel holds a harlequinned herd
of furied horses, sulfurous lightning streaking white
from flaming hooves and flaring nostrils. In this moonlight,
the empty Angora meadow gleams as if filled with the clean backs
of a thousand newborn lambs. Our gigantic pine claws the full face
of the passing orb – the tree spikes the heart of our flying planet,
and about it we spin – the whole wide earth and me where I stand,
turning and burning and turning around it.

Join us, but arrive prepared to be changed. I work for hours
with fervent inspiration, but never a moment’s desire
to breathe again the rancid air of London. I will not
be returning soon. Perhaps ever. There. I’ve said it.

—

Lou Amyx’s poetry may be seen in The Arena, Naugatuck River Review, Tidal Basin Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV: Louisiana, at qaartsiluni.com, melusine.com as the winner of the 2011 Vivienne Haigh-Wood Poetry Prize, and soon in Sugar Mule. A chapbook, The Bracelet, is available from Finishing Line Press.

#177 Tierra Amarilla, 1967 by Katherine DeBlassie

In his dream the sleeping giants rode on frozen horses
and no one told them they were in the desert,
that the hooves of the horses would begin
to melt and fail to mend. The sun,

unlike the preacher, seemed not to move.
It stayed steady, pressed like a stamp
against unflinching bright blues of sky
and mountains. He never graduated high school,

but the Assembly of God gave him religion,
and a language of justice, love and outrage.
In the Bible Institute he was ordained
to go across a country, sleep under bridges,

and travel by boxcar to protect the ejido,
the land that’s forever being taken and claimed
and reclaimed each culture so intertwined in sex and marriage,
it’s hard to tell one shade of brown from another.

The Day of God came with the preacher
and 20 men with shot guns and pistols—
they raided the courthouse. We don’t believe in violence,
we believe in Jesus Christ who used a whip to drive the false
 
prophets out of the temple. Stolen or delayed justice.
He had the right to arrest anyone who violated
the rights of his people. He was the giant awake,
he was the wild-west shoot out, he had the right to ride
frozen horses until they were melted or freed.

—

Katherine DeBlassie was born and raised in Albuquerque and earned her MFA from the University of Maryland. Her work has appeared in Court Green and Cutthroat, among others. She received honorable mention for the 2011 Rita Dove Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2009 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.

#176 Rio Grande Symphony by Tony Mares

A symphony of almost things,
swirling quarks, electrons, and atoms,
circulate through the busy streets
of Albuquerque.  They are
the remnants of people,
of cultures, of pueblos, who lived here
before we laid railroad tracks,
built up the cityscape of buildings
and deadly alleys. These bits and its
of almost nothing are everywhere.
Listen and you will hear their songs
as you walk down the street.
Sniff the air, you will smell
the chile roasted thousands
of years ago.  Close your eyes
to see the clear river, the deer,
bear, eagles, mountain lions,
animals long gone who watched
people long gone from here.

Yet they are still here
in every molecule you inhale,
in every shadow you forget
or never knew about or remembered
in the first place.

I walk the streets of Albuquerque,
the sentimental paths from downtown
to Old Town.  All about me
I am aware of the immense past,
alive in the immense present,
stepping smartly into the future.

—

Tony Mares was born in Albuquerque though and has traveled widely. His poems in have appeared in over six books of poetry, many anthologies, on You Tube, and have been published internationally.

#175 Postcard to New Mexico by Sandra Vallie

It’s gray here and almost nothing
more needs saying
in Michigan winter a survival
course in tricking your mind desperate
remainders of sun, color and light winnowed
from holly berries, mulched pansies a faint

reflected summer shimmers open
to lavender and mango skies mountains
(always the mountains) vision of dry rivers
and chamisa New Mexico blossoms belief
collapses past and future, here and there
until tonight in the damp, cold dark

I walk from this gray here, my past
down this brown-grassed hill dive
through the iced pond swim
into the Rio Grande
walk into “the tent of your blessed funkiness”
into Albuquerque

*”the tent of your blessed funkiness” is from Dee Cohen’s poem, “Slouching Toward ABQ.” “Postcard to New Mexico appeared in a slightly different form at  The Sunday Poem at the Duke City Fix.

….

Sandra Vallie’s work has appeared in Adobe Walls, Airplane Reading, Red Ravine, and in the Sunday Poem at Duke City Fix. Sandra’s blog, Writing It Down In The High Desert, can be found at sandrarenee.com. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

#174 La Jicarita by Belinda Laumbach

Una montaña bañada con sol.
sonrié, despierta.

Otro día, perezosa
y cubierta con nublina.

A veces enojada
envuelta con nubes negras.

Por la noche fría
tapada con nieve.

Las estrellas cristalinas
le dan diamantes.

Una montaña viva
con arboles verdes.

El sol la baña y despierta.

Sonrié

—

La Jicarita

A mountain bathed with sunshine
smiles, awakens.

Another day, lazy
covered with fog.

At times, angry
wrapped in black clouds.

At night, cold
covered with snow.

The stars, crystalline
give it diamonds

A mountain, alive
with green trees.

The sun bathes it awake.

It smiles.

—

Belinda Pacheco Laumbach was raised on a ranch in New Mexico.  One of her poems was included in a publication as a result of a competition for Hispanic Women Writers of New Mexico.  Although bilingual, her poetry “comes out” only in Spanish and only around themes related to the environment.

#173 Winter Arrives Late in Albuquerque by Samantha Erin Tetangco

17 December 2010

The snow fell upon the city like a mistake,
erasing the mountains to the east—
no more watermelons, no more majestic climb
to the peak—and left instead an open horizon.
An eclipsed day shrouded in plain.

—

Samantha Erin Tetangco’s fiction and poetry have appeared and in Phoebe, the Oklahoma Review, Gargoyle, and others.  She has an MFA from the University of New Mexico and served as editor for Blue Mesa Review.  Tetangco currently teaches creative writing and composition at the University and blogs at writersmarch.wordpress.com.

#172 ZUNI DRUMS by Katherine B. Hauth

On the foot-packed earth of the plaza
Zuni drums beat

piñon fires
beat bread baking in hornos
beat sureness of solstice
beat out blue sky toward the east

streaked with pink clouds
beat in rain to reach fields
for life-giving corn
beat in harvest and planting

which turns into harvest again.
Drums beat from the beginning
to always
in circular pattern

spirits woven into earth living
beat for kachinas in body paint
and horned headdresses
approaching the plaza.

Drums beat for births
beat for deaths
beat for tattooed teens
beat for boy on broad shoulders

straddling black braid
thumping the beats
on his dad’s Yankee cap
beat for grandmothers in flowered shawls

who no longer hear but know the beat
through the earth and their feet
the pulsing of creation.
All hearts beating.

Let Zuni drums beat
beat   beat   beat !

—

Katherine Hauth turned to writing after careers as teacher and personnel analyst. She’s published poetry for adults and children and two children’s books. What’s for Dinner? Quirky, Squirmy Poems from the Animal World, 2011, Outstanding Science Trade Book and Junior Library Guild title, received a 2011 New Mexico Book Award.

#171 America Dreams of Roswell by Jeannine Hall Gailey

The forbidding sugar of hot desert sand
and hallucinations of mushroom clouds
 
linger in a city where you can still get pie
with a fried egg on top, where you might catch
 
a glimpse of UFO dazzle. Even the lampposts bloom
into alien heads. Barbed wire might keep out enemies
 
of the American dream, where the tiny famous lizard’s legs
cling to sad, solid rock. On the Trinity site, that sand
 
turned to green glass. The scientists were unsure
about igniting the whole earth’s atmosphere, nevertheless
 
the violet light demanded goggles. Shadows of ranch houses,
their neat boxes burned deep into the ground.

—

Jeannine Hall Gailey is Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington, and the author of Becoming the Villainess and She Returns to the Floating World. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner. She teaches part-time at National University’s MFA program and volunteers for Crab Creek Review.

LA SIERRA by Joanna Cattonar

Below Taos Mountain

I pray north.
I pray into the mountain.
Mist in the mountain passes, my prayer
rises in the watersheds and falls
along the ridges like rain.
My words waterfall in the trees
and pool in their branches.
Leaf after leaf gives way
and spills, an elision of leaves,
the sibilance of pain.
I pray into the clearing
of the amber dome
in a rainforest of jade.

The old one calls in the mountain,
cries out over this blue plain,
and I plead like a child
teach me       teach me
lend me the lion’s muscled patience,
the slow hawk’s measuring tongue
teach me
the pronghorn’s stillness,
the bear’s deep dream . . .

the old one calls in the mountain
cries out over this blue plain
adored child,
be attentive as you walk
yours the ear of the doe,
the feet of the newborn fawn
be attentive as you love

the feet of the beloved tremble
quick    in a run    dreaming
the moon climbs,
the beloved stirs
let my hands rise out of my hands
I call into the clearing
I call into the cold
My prayer falls like snow above the timberline

*underpublished

—

Joanna Cattonar came to New Mexico over forty years ago by way of a poetry residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos.  Her poems have been published widely in journals, most recently in Sinister Wisdom and Gertrude.

#169 THE ELECT by Jean Nordhaus

The sun has chosen one piñon to exalt,
one tree from a forest of others,
as when, in a film, the camera will select

one face to focus on, one girl
to follow in her progress
through her soul’s adventure. And now

a mountain bluebird has alighted
on the topmost branch of the piñon
like a Christmas angel—and now

the bird has flown, carrying away
the sanctifying ray of light, so the tree
is once more just an ordinary piñon

among others. And the girl,
without the auteur’s gaze, is star
of no one’s movie but her own

with no beam of light to hallow her,
no camera to peruse her face, her every
gesture with the eye of love.
—

Born in Baltimore, Maryland and married to a native New Mexican, Jean Nordhaus lives in Washington, DC but sojourns frequently in Taos. Her books of poetry include The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn (Milkweed Editions) and Innocence (Ohio State University Press.) She is currently Review Editor of Poet Lore.

#168 Patrick Swayze in New Mexico: Star Sightings You Don’t Write Home About by Dominika Wrozynski

He hunkers in plaid shirts now, hides lips that made women
swoon behind year-old stubble, spins the corner bar stool
at The Hitching Post, the rancher dive that only serves Bud.

The El Fidel and Joe’s Ringside have 86ed him already, joined
his name to the list of honorable mentions, like the brothers
who fought pit bulls behind the Immaculate Conception

Church. But this Las Vegas, New Mexico, city of Billy the Kid,
and Doc Holiday’s Saloon. Roosevelt’s Roughriders remain
dusty knickknacks in an adobe museum, open only

on Wednesdays. Here the devil says goodnight, at the base
of the Sangre de Cristos, where Jesus would have run out
of water and loaves, would have to settle for iced tea

and hot tortillas made daily at the Spic n’ Span Diner,
once a laundromat. No matter what he did, Jesus could
never be from here. Patrick, too is only humored

by the bartender because she remembers ingesting
electricity, tonguing his face on the television screen.
So when we see him, we want to throw him a doughnut,

a rope, a life raft, dress him in black Carhart, waterproof him
for the coming monsoon season. It is what happens to children
whose parents have grown old. We fear his passing. But above

all else we want to shift his beer belly into the center
and surround him with college co-eds, because we are all
better than to let Patrick Swayze drink alone in a corner.

—

Dominika Wrozynski teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Florida State University as a Visiting Faculty Instructor. Her latest poems have appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, Slipstream, The Portland Review, and The Spoon River Poetry Review. She also has Polish-English poem translations in the latest issue of Espresso Ink.

#167 The Cucumber by Tomas Urrea

He washed that cucumber as lovingly as a mother would wash a new born baby.

The bucket was old, how old I can’t even guess.

It was a well bucket that had a ring forged into the handle.

And the water was reverently used so as not to spill a single drop.

In an instant I observed a lifetime.

A farmer who had to go to work for the post office to support his family of 14.

A postmaster who had to farm to keep his children from going hungry.

A life of dreams and aspirations never realized.

Yet resentments never materialized.
In the caressing of a cucumber.

—

Tomas Urrea is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico where he has not yet lived his entire life.  He is an
educator/farmer/beekeeper.  He is married to Valerie, and has two beautiful daughters.  Tomas can usually be found in his backyard studio writing and sampling his homemade mead.

#166 Picking Capulín by H. Marie Aragón

In a small tin bucket
she carefully strips
the branch of capulín.
Juices fill the creases
of her fingers stained
crimson and purple.

Tía Corina, always wears
an apron over a cotton dress;
she has a hump on her back,
no teeth, never a lover.

She helps her mother
clean the house, make the beds,
prepare the food
wash the breakfast dishes
as her sisters walk to school –
the school that her father built.

The Spanish Peaks stand in the distance.
A fleeting scent of pine needles,
sweet clover and wild lilies tease her senses.
En los campos de verano
her daily world vanishes.

Come late August,
the green chokecherry leaves
turn red, mustard, then brown.
Keep the horses at a distance as
dry leaves are sweeten with poison,
but the fruit is ripe for jam.

Boil jars twice for safety
apples for pectin, cook then crush.
Capulín bubbles in la olla
on the wood-burning stove.

She tests the jam on warm tortillas –
astringent taste of capulín makes
her mouth water – confuses the palate.

After the purple jars are stored in the winter cupboard –
Tía Carina unties her apron, puts on her camisón,
takes down her bun, lays her head on the pillow
and dreams of sweet clover, wild lilies
y el rio that runs to the sea.

*Translations:

Tia Corina                          (Aunt Corrine)

En los campos de verano   (In the summer fields)

la olla                                   (cooking pot)

camisón                               (night gown)

rio                                        (river)

Published Spring 2011, Malpaís Review Vol, 1, NO. 4

—

H. Marie Aragón, a member of High Desert Poets lives and writes in Santa Fe.   Her work is often grounded in her ancestral history in New Mexico and Colorado.  Marie’s work is published in various literary magazines.