Chera Hammons
Topography
On our maps, it looks like there are rivers
stretched like nets across the Llano Estacado,
holding the land together in a loose bunch
like leaves against a brown sky,
and the sharp banks could be breaking like sunlight
from behind the rivers.
The coyotes don't have maps
and wander for days to find a way to stop thirsting,
trotting through ground that offers no cover, flat and wind-scraped.
They chew through sky-blue plastic irrigation pipes
and yip with their families at night
just past the edges of the hard-packed county roads.
From the dark they watch the furrows fill
in unchecked rushes and gurgles,
the white seeds washing in rivulets to the ditch.
The next night more of their kind will come.
The night after that, the pipes will be metal,
and there will be no coyotes there.
If we try to find the rivers, we come to
their passages carved into the sandstone,
where a little water might flow to the reservoir
once a year, twice if there is a rainy season north of us.
We are a dry country, with all our wealth stored
more and more underground these days.
We can step over it with dry feet.
Nobody builds bridges.
Still, we are taught that long ago everything around us
was underwater, that opal washed down
from the Rockies in the flood,
that you could stand
on a high point
and never see the end of that ocean.
One day the fish curled into the sandstone,
spreading their leaf-vein fins
as their spines became their language.
I study their lines, tracks
like shimmering blue topaz in yellow rock.
There are no hills to climb, but I wonder how far up
I’d have to go to see land that way. For all I know
those snaking blue lines are the only way to say
there is room for rivers here.
Chera Hammons is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, Tupelo Quarterly, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other fine publications. Her chapbook Amaranthine Hour received the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award. Her book Recycled Explosions is forthcoming from Ink Brush Press. She is a member of the editorial board of poetry journal One. She lives in Amarillo, TX and teaches at Clarendon College. www.cherahammons.com
Return to March 2016 Edition
On our maps, it looks like there are rivers
stretched like nets across the Llano Estacado,
holding the land together in a loose bunch
like leaves against a brown sky,
and the sharp banks could be breaking like sunlight
from behind the rivers.
The coyotes don't have maps
and wander for days to find a way to stop thirsting,
trotting through ground that offers no cover, flat and wind-scraped.
They chew through sky-blue plastic irrigation pipes
and yip with their families at night
just past the edges of the hard-packed county roads.
From the dark they watch the furrows fill
in unchecked rushes and gurgles,
the white seeds washing in rivulets to the ditch.
The next night more of their kind will come.
The night after that, the pipes will be metal,
and there will be no coyotes there.
If we try to find the rivers, we come to
their passages carved into the sandstone,
where a little water might flow to the reservoir
once a year, twice if there is a rainy season north of us.
We are a dry country, with all our wealth stored
more and more underground these days.
We can step over it with dry feet.
Nobody builds bridges.
Still, we are taught that long ago everything around us
was underwater, that opal washed down
from the Rockies in the flood,
that you could stand
on a high point
and never see the end of that ocean.
One day the fish curled into the sandstone,
spreading their leaf-vein fins
as their spines became their language.
I study their lines, tracks
like shimmering blue topaz in yellow rock.
There are no hills to climb, but I wonder how far up
I’d have to go to see land that way. For all I know
those snaking blue lines are the only way to say
there is room for rivers here.
Chera Hammons is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, Tupelo Quarterly, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other fine publications. Her chapbook Amaranthine Hour received the 2012 Jacar Press Chapbook Award. Her book Recycled Explosions is forthcoming from Ink Brush Press. She is a member of the editorial board of poetry journal One. She lives in Amarillo, TX and teaches at Clarendon College. www.cherahammons.com
Return to March 2016 Edition