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By Katherine Johnson
April 17, 2023
It was a yellow day,
Not the sky but the ground,
Withered and wound around
My eyes,
while the clouds,
Bluest grey slid by
Pushed by a greasy wind
That mortal eyes can’t define.
Sometimes I just give up,
Trying to understand anything,
Like why I am parked
In the middle of this field
Full of black cows that
Suck the light out of the day,
And stare at me,
immobile,
But for their ears and eyes.
Years earlier when my life was desperate,
When everything fell apart, marriage, career,
Myself, a time when I was chased by subpoenas,
And by the winter winds and snow of Wyoming,
One night I fell asleep in that back of my pickup,
Buried alive, a mile deep beneath exhaustion,
The truck began to rock and sway,
I dreamed of laying on a beach in Mexico,
Or in the bed of my now dead life,
When I slowly came to the world
And discovered I was in field of
Snow and cows rubbing and warming,
Themselves in the wind shadow
That was the remnants of my life.
One day I decided I needed
Something that would keep me
From the excesses, the consequences,
The empty days, wolves by the hour
By the glass and bottle
Something that would be
Something I would follow
The Overland trail from
Mesilla Station to Apache Pass
Over the border in Arizona.
That I did up the Rio Grande valley,
Past the north face of Picacho Peak,
Slipping between the Sleeping Lady,
And the Rough and Ready Hills,
Up and over the Magdalena Gap,
Past Massacre Peak onto Good Sight Peak
Where the tracks of the wagons, still defined,
Went past where the dead
Who failed this journey were left to rot,
Onto Fort Cummings, now a carcass,
And the graves of the Cavalry soldiers
Killed by serious, desperate, Apache men.
After that everything went wrong.
First, I couldn’t defeat private land,
And suddenly I discovered an
Unmarked monsoon dip in an
Unmarked county road whose number
I don’t remember anymore,
Where I smashed into that surprise
And blew up the front suspension of my car
because I was driving like a maniac.
Now weeks later
On a particular yellow day
With a sky of the bluest grey
I find myself in a field again
Out by the Sleeping Lady,
Surrounded by black cows,
Thinking about everything
Wrong in the wrong way,
That I dare to presume
I understand anything,
Why I should even care,
Standing on this far end
Of my branch of life
In this yellow field
Fading into Wyoming
When I lived in my truck
Awakened by the cold and cows,
Straining to not notice
That all I want to do is
drink and get stoned.
Copyright 2023 By Katherine Johnson – All Rights Reserved