*
I feel guilty that I love dead trees—
their branches shocked straight, silver-whipped
and hung
with bright yellow tangles of wolf lichen,
a replacement
they’re living with.
I think of wolves,
of ranchers mixing the powdered lichen poison
into deer fat to tempt them.
The cows,
uneasy at the smell,
move to the next field.
*
On the news,
the County Police Chief says
We may never know why
the 12-year-old boy in Ohio
shot his 9-year-old brother in the head,
then shot himself:
No struggle,
the younger boy
sitting in a children’s chair
like he was watching T.V.
But is the question why?
We know:
2 bullets fired—
.44 caliber—
from their grandfather’s gun.
*
In our dry valley,
the town cistern sits among shorn trunks
on a foothill above us,
its squat white mushroom stem
collecting rain and well water
to irrigate the crops and fill
the houses’ bathtubs and cups.
If only, it drips. If...if...if...if...
Anna Ross is the author of If a Storm, winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Memorious, The Paris Review, Salamander, and Southern Poetry Review and received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.