Rhoda used to tell people she was a captive even though anyone with eyes and a nose could see they belonged together. Boyd, red face and all, was her father. There was no hiding that odor of land, that set of blue eyes and gold cap of hair, that love of animal slaughter and the colour red, that bull dog squareness of their shoulders. And Jane could be no one other than her mother, flinty chin, hand on hip, gunslinger style, the trigger temper.

But Rhoda persisted, used to beg rides to the county library (twice on a wagon and once on a tractor). She looked up all the names of all the women who had ever been stolen, tortured, killed, or assimilated into a tribe not of her own choosing. There was Cynthia Ann Parker and Rebecca Kellogg, Mercy Harbison and Fanny Kelly. Mary Draper, the county librarian, refused to help her get Rachel Plummer's Narrative of 21 Months' Servitude as a Prisoner Among the Comanche Indians. She said it wasn't fitting for a young lady.

She told Rhoda's parents, I think that child is unhealthy.

Boyd and Jane had to disagree. They understood a child's needs, the longing for change, for rain and a city. They'd grown up under the poverty of sun, sky, and endless mesas. They knew the limits of brown and gold and brown.

Still there would be no more trips to the library. If Rhoda had to read, let her read Jane's old novels – The Virginian, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Log of a Cowboy. If Rhoda had to dream, let her dream of cattle and hay, quilts and the occasional orchard.

Herman Begay, a man twice her age, a salesman who belonged everywhere and nowhere, who said he'd seen New York and could take her to Denver, offered her escape. She thought him handsome in a dark, foreign way. She loved his trunk full of tractor catalogs, the pictures of bulls for sale, the promise of “fine hogs.”

Boyd said, Don't go.

Jane just shrugged her shoulders.

They never married, never had children, although they did the things married couples did.

Now that's captivity, Mary Draper would tell any patron to the library.

Rhoda didn't care. She loved Herman. He took her to Denver, kept her in red dresses and green Cadillacs. Life was fun. She thought of writing a memoir.

Nan Wigington

Nan Wigington lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Her flash has appeared in Gravel, Spelk, and Pithead Chapel.

Old Plum
      
The landscape, continents away from where I stand,
hemispheric change, yet oddly similar.
 
Rough, layered stone, trees twisted by the bellow
of wind, a few branches in bud, a few branches
 
heavy in death. Yet among this bleakness, an explosion
of delicate flowers, white tinged with pink. Next to them,
 
a valiant beam of red petals and green leaves rooted
in rock. If I stare into the flower’s heart, I can see
 
the past, back and back and back, when the world
was blushed with beginning, the sky held
 
a young sun in its turquoise hands, the spirits
of the dead twirled in mad joy.

Valerie Bacharach

Valerie Bacharach’s poetry has appeared in several publications including Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh Quarterly, US 1 Worksheets, The Tishman Review, Topology Magazine, Poetica, VerseWrights, and Voices from the Attic.  She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic workshops and conducts weekly poetry workshops for the women at Power House and CeCe’s Place, halfway houses for women in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.  Her first chapbook, Fireweed, will be published in 2018 by Main Street Rag. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Picasso’s Bicycle

was blue and for a period his favoured means of travel.
When it ceased to be of use it was propped against a fence,
abandoned to the weather.  

In the summer of forty-two,
left to entertain his daughter Maya, the artist
organised an afternoon sketching flowers.
But the child wandered off and chancing on the wreck,
she asked her father to take it indoors and make it better.

Whilst Maya ate her biscuits and drank milk,
Pablo set to work and when he said,
Look, I have made you a magnificent bull’s head,
there were tears.

Sandra Burnett

This poem previously appeared in the pamphlet New Lease, Half Moon Books.

Sandra Burnett lives in Otley, West Yorkshire, UK. She has been published in anthologies produced by Half Moon Books and in poetry magazines including Prole, Frogmore Papers, Strix, Coast-to-Coast-to-Coast, and Magma 71: the Film Issue. She enjoys performing her poetry and her pamphlet New Lease is published by Half Moon Books.

http://www.halfmoonbooks.co.uk/

​

Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap 
                                          
 
A dazzling scene—why mar it with a bird trap?   
About Breugel, Auden was never wrong--
that meaning waits unnoticed in the corner      
while winter sunlight floods the snow, blots sky,
turns shapes to figures skating on noonday shadows.
 
Villagers spread across the glowing ice,
and birds watch, like the many-eyed houses
turned toward the skaters. And, stillest, the heavy boards, 
propped on a stick, baited for hungry beaks. 
 
But now I see that the skaters, themselves, are trapped
in a winter dream of freedom and sunlit snow.
And I have been enthralled along with them
by this silent prologue glimpsed through tangled limbs,
this glow flooding ice, blurring a weight's faint shadow--
 
so caught up that I missed the hole in the ice         
and the string on the trap, its unseen hand offstage
(a boy's? the devil's? the painter’s?) waiting for dazzled
souls like mine grown heedless in blissful light.

Memye Curtis Tucker

Memye Curtis Tucker is the author of  The Watchers (Hollis Summers Prize, Ohio University Press), the prizewinning chapbooks Admit One and Storm Line, and Holding Patterns; and poems in Poetry Daily, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, Shidae Munhuck [featured in Korean translation], Southern Review, among others. With a Ph.D. in English literature, multiple fellowships from MacDowell, VCCA, and the Georgia Council for the Arts, and numerous awards, she teaches poetry writing and is former Senior Editor of Atlanta Review.

Crater Lake, 1923
 
I stood before the lake
one summer day
 
minerals fell
silent fragments
 
all at once
the souls of children rose up together
 
headed west
over the valley
 
surrender
not grief
 
nothing rippled
the lake’s surface

An Oasis in the Badlands, 1905
 
This land has not saved us.
My horse drinks here
for the last time.
Winter will come, unaware
of how I leaned back in the saddle
as my animal filled herself,
the river emptying
under her hooves;
loss wears away
to black and white
soft like ashes after
a prairie fire.

Canyon de Chelly, 1904
 
The distance divides itself
and becomes greater,
a covert equation.
 
Our horses raise their heads,
alert to barometric change.
We look up from the sandy floor
 
to the top of an island.
What logic put an ocean here
and then took it away
 
gallon by salty gallon?

The Rush Gatherer, 1910
 
All day
I go about my work
groping through mud
and living things.
People think
the hardest part
is bundling thick
wet grass, but
it’s watching my hands
disappear into
that dark water
again and again.

The Vanishing Race, 1904
 
When you finally saw us
you gave us names
intended to destroy.
 
We are going
not because we are doomed
but because you are. 
 
You have facts and we
have facts.  How differently
the truth accords itself.
 
We know
how to address the mountain.
No towns will come here
 
and roads will dwindle to one.
No one else wanted this land:
we, its reluctant
 
caretakers, ride
the horses you brought us
straight into the cliff.

Erica Goss

Four of these poems were first published as a sequence by Ekphrasis.
 
Erica Goss served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA from 2013-2016. She is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2016 Lyrebird Award, Wild Place and Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets. Recent work appears in Lake Effect, Atticus Review, Contrary, Convergence, Spillway, Eclectica, The Tishman Review, Tinderbox, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Main Street Rag, among others. She is editor of Sticks & Stones, a bi-monthly poetry newsletter. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com.