From "Heritage of the Blood Wolf Moon"
vi
Because of their last name,
the sisters believed they owned
the town. TALL CHIEF spelled
out on the marquee,
the gem of Fairfax,
built by their father.
That theater, a shell,
as long as I can
recall, a shell
emptied from inside,
without nacre or mussel.
Ghosts of dressing rooms
beneath the sweep of stage,
the place where vaudevillians,
between the acts, swapped out
their costumes. Last spring’s
tornado tore up the town,
now an abandoned
movie set, businesses boarded
up, except the dollar
store at the end of Main.
I step across the glass
like cracked ice, outside
the blownout storefronts, the beams
of the theater’s roof, newly
refurbished, blasted away.
As if trying to rewrite
an ending, we climb
the hill to excavate the terracotta house,
my mother’s childhood home.
vii
My mother’s childhood home
where the driveway is overgrown
with weeds, surrounded by upstart trees,
sycamores and oaks, tunneling
uphill toward the brick edifice.
A carrion beetle, bright orange
and black, scuttles across
the path. The endangered
Burying Beetle digs a grave,
mummifies its prey—
the voles and snakes—then returns
to the tomb to mate
and raise its young.
If discovered on a construction
site in Oklahoma, all drilling
terminates. A shred of white
curtain in an upstairs window—
I imagine my grandmother still alive,
inside the ruined house.
My grandmother’s fudge
cools on the wooden kitchen
table downstairs. In the basement
a rattler twines inside
the dryer. Outside, I cut
cattle on quarter
horses, pressing my twelve-year-old
knees into leather, swerving in sync
with the herd. Riding back
to the barn, the horse
is spooked. A garter snake ripples
beneath a plot of leaves.